Reviews by Douglas Sealy and Siobhan Long.
Sandra Oman (sporano), Mairead Hurley (piano)
Bank of Ireland Arts Centre
By Douglas Sealy
What kind of figure does Novello cut in the company of Strauss and Duparc? With Waltz of my Heart, My Dearest Dear and We'll Gather Lilacs, the answer has to be that his brand of populism remains in a limbo between music hall and recital room. Although Sandra Oman sang with plenty of passion, she left one wondering why she had chosen to espouse such second rate stuff.
Fortunately, her talents appeared in a better light in the major part of her lunchtime recital in the Bank of Ireland Arts Centre last Wednesday.
She brought to Strauss's Die Nacht, Schlechtes Wetter, Wiegenlied, Zueignung and Allerseelen a poise and restraint that gave these songs a sense of freshness and innocence that they seldom attain, well known as they are.
In Duparc's Le manoir de Rosemonde she perhaps underlined the emotions too forcibly; a line like "comme un chien l'amour m'a mordu" just needs to be stated; the pain and the urgency of the lover's quest is adequately conveyed in the masterful rhythms of the piano part, well played by Mairead Hurley. Duparc's Chanson Triste was quite seductive in its curving vocal line, and the singer, here as elsewhere, was eagar to communicate the message of the words.
John Wynne, John Carty, Alan Kelly and Aileen O'Connor
Coach House, Dublin Castle
By Siobhan Long
Roscommon's traditional roots have often been buried beneath the louder strains of Leitrim and east Galway, but this quartet goes some way towards rectifying that particular PR anomaly. John Wynne is a particularly able flag-bearer, wielding his flute with no small degree of alacrity and weaving scéals and tall tales in between the jigs, reels and hornpipes as seamlessly as a practised cardiac surgeon.
For a while, this opening night of the Music Network Tour inevitably revealed the gaps between the foursome who owed their collective identity to their Music Network sponsors. Not having shared a stage (at least in this incarnation) before, they chafed at the edges, and desperately sought out the common ground, each musician struggling to knit the tunes together as though with every stitch there was an equivalent unravelling at the other end.
Aileen O'Connor's voice was a constant throughout. Unadorned and honest, with a remarkable clarity of tone, she boldly went where many a lesser soul would fear to tread: kicking off with the local Griffinstown Hill and embracing the contemporary (The Evelyn Marie) as well as the comfortingly familiar (Siúl A Rún), her voice consistently struck at the heart of the singing tradition, and gathered her audience all in around her, as though we were party to the repertoire for a whole lot longer than a turn of the clock.
Individually, the three musicians sparkled. Alan Kelly's piano accordion was surprisingly restrained on the set of The Wingflapper/Greer's, but still characteristically double-jointed when negotiating reels such as the impish Planxty Charles O'Connor and Willie Coleman's jig. John Carty's fiddle was probably the shyest of them all, lurking behind hooded eyes for a while, only daring to come out into full light in the second half of the night after he tentatively added banjo to the mix on a set that included Johnny Henry and Handsome Sally.
It was Wynne's flute and whistle that scaffolded the foursome effortlessly. With phrasing that would be the envy of the most fluent of polyglots, he showcased a magnificent North Connaught repertoire, joined by his sister on flute for the final gallop through a reel set kick-started by Anderson's.
Leaving the cosy confines of The Coach House, we couldn't help feeling we'd been party to the warm-up and that the best was yet to come.
Chances are the spices are percolating with a vengeance now that they've put a handful of gigs under their collective belt.
