Reviewed today are Gia Yashvili (violin), David Agnew (oboe), I Fiori/Cora Venus Lunny (violin) at University Concert Hall, Limerick and Compania Vicente Saez at Firkin Crane, Cork and Ani DiFranco at Ambassador, Dublin
It's really hard to know what to make of the début of I Fiori, the young chamber orchestra directed by Cora Venus Lunny, which presented itself to the public for the first time at University Concert Hall in Limerick on Thursday.
It was not an auspicious début. The orchestra's playing was dutiful rather than spirited. It tended towards untidiness in ensemble and variability in intonation. And, apart from a few moments of strange point-making in Vivaldi's Four Seasons, there was little in the way of interpretative focus.
The sense of leadership that came from the orchestra's young director was very limited. She seemed to have difficulty achieving clean starts to movements and often fell into the trap of leading by playing in front of the beat.
Even in those movements when she could relax as a soloist and devote her full attention to the orchestra, there was little sense of purposeful shaping either in her gestures or in the music-making that resulted from them.
It became clear very early on in Vivaldi's Four Seasons that the burden of the new role was taking its toll on the playing of this talented performer, who is just out of her teens. Some of the problems were like creases in a fabric, accidental occurrences of varying duration, which were clearly going to iron themselves out in due course.
But the dramatic moment when the soloist simply lost her way, stopped playing, consulted with the leader and exited the stage without explanation was the truest indication of how taxing she was finding her dual responsibilities. It is fully to her credit that she returned to the stage - with her own music part - re-started the movement and kept the show on the road.
Wisely, the two Bach concertos of the second half were played from the music, which, to the virtual exclusion of her fellow soloists, Gia Yashvili and David Agnew, and the orchestral players, then took all the young director's attention. The expressive contrapuntal richness of the music was dissipated in this sadly as-you-please scenario.
The courage of Cora Venus Lunny in fronting this concert and the resilience she showed in coping with its mishaps can only be applauded. But the wisdom of setting herself such daunting challenges at this stage in her career can only be questioned.
Michael Dervan
The intention to fuse live dance on stage with matching filmed sequences on screen is fraught with risks, which Compania Vicente Saez cannot quite avoid in this presentation of Ruah at the Institute of Contemporary Dance at the Firkin Crane. The most obvious, inescapable and therefore questionable risk is that of perspective.
The images on screen are fashioned within a different sense of proportion to the sequences on stage; their intimacy, too, is charged with a different energy - that of the film-maker as opposed to that of the dancer - and have a different, possibly more compelling, appeal.
This makes an argument worth having; but it is an argument about technology rather than technique, because the effect of the piece (which is how it has to be described if the live dance and the film are accepted as interwoven parts of the same whole) is magical.
Its extremes of light - almost to the point of irradiation - and perspective illuminate the strongly balletic convention from which dancer Lorenza di Calogero translates the choreography of Vicente Saez, working to tracks including Marianne Faithful, Janis Joplin, Passengers and Sinead O'Connor.
The themes are trenchant, the mood personalised, the movement dictated by a tense, internalised rhythm emphasised by the lingering camera-work and sharp-edged editing of Sylvia Zade and by the stage lighting design of Toni Sancho.
Mary Leland
DiFranco is a living, breathing, foot-stomping incarnation of that age-old union of the personal and the political. A forerunner but by no means a part of the angst-ridden-young-woman music scene of the 1990s, the 29-year-old American folk singer has cleaved a path for herself through the musical establishment over the past decade, releasing 13 albums on her own label, Righteous Babe Records, arguably the most famous independent US label.
Beefing up her sound with the addition of trumpet and saxophone to her superb three-piece backing band, DiFranco struggled somewhat to overcome an unhelpful sound mix. Despite a warm reception that rapidly heated up to ecstatic, she had trouble getting into her stride. The calm stage presence, the easy manner and banter with the audience were all there, but for much of the gig the performance failed to deliver the many subtleties of DiFranco's studio recordings.
The jazz flavour of the accompaniment did not gel well with the acoustic temperament of her songs, and while her voice was as strong as ever, the nuances in her vocals were lost behind a muddy sound.
Behind the dreadlocks, tattoos and body piercings is a largely conventional folk artist, and one who excels at fostering an intimacy with the listener on her recordings. Yet the "rock-show" setting only served to dilute her politically-charged lyricism, stripping her songs of much of their personality. For DiFranco, the personal and the political are the same; but, in the absence of either, both her passion and her performance lost all its potency.
John Lane
