Reviews include Orla Boylan, Mary Plazas (sopranos) with the NSO at the National Concert Hall and James X at the Temple Bar Music Centre

Orla Boylan, Mary Plazas (sopranos)

NSO/Gerhard Markson

NCH, Dublin

Khovanshchina Prelude . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Mussorgsky/Rimsky-Korsakov

The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, Act II . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . .Gerald Barry

Khovanshchina Prelude . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ..Mussorgsky/Shostakovich

Petrushka (1947) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Stravinsky

The first three pieces in the programme from the National Symphony Orchestra dealt with unfinished operas. The prelude to Mussorgsky's Khovanshchina, which the composer worked on from 1872 to 1880 (just a year before his death), was heard in two orchestrations, Rimsky-Korsakov's familiar version, and a plainer yet more telling one by Shostakovich, from the late 1950s.

Gerald Barry's The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant is still unfinished because it has only been begun. Friday's programme included a concert performance of the Second Act, which was commissioned by RTÉ for the NSO.

Barry's intention is to set, without alteration, the entire text of Rainer Werner Fassbinder's play. The plot deals with an obsessive relationship between the mature, divorced fashion designer, Petra, and the young Karin. In Act II we find Petra taking emotional flight, blissfully unaware of the one-sidedness of what she is experiencing.

The mismatch between the helplessly overcome Petra and the matter-of-fact, suspicious Karin, provides comedy of the blackest kind, which Barry, with Brittenish certainty of purpose, somehow both leaves to speak for itself and comments on with observant relish.

The situation is both fantastical and mundane, and the almost absurdly contrasted characters miss each other's intent by a mile as they engage in what appears to be an altogether everyday encounter. Barry's music retains the composer's celebrated, adrenaline-rich energy, while also, in contrast to his previous two operas, taking account of long-established traditions of musical theatre that he has shunned in the past. He has, it seems, found simpler means with which to sustain that drive and intensity of which he is so fond.

It would be an exaggeration to say that Orla Boylan as Petra and Mary Plazas as Karin were able to project the text with consistent clarity.

But it was easy to imagine that much more might be clearly communicated in the opera house, with an orchestra in the pit. In The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, Barry seems, unexpectedly, to have produced an opera that, when it finally reaches the stage, will surely thrive in a naturalistic setting.

Gerhard Markson and the NSO gave a disciplined account of this challenging new work, and the two singers threw themselves into their demanding roles with gusto.

The concert concluded with an equally disciplined but curiously dispassionate account of Stravinsky's Petrushka. The technical finish of the playing included much to admire, but the effect was often expressively flat.

Michael Dervan

James X

Temple Bar Music Centre

James X, written, directed and performed by Gerard Mannix Flynn, is obviously autobiographical. He has chosen to assign a measure of anonymity to it, no doubt to underline its representative character, and also to allow himself a measure of artistic freedom. The device is justified on both counts.

So James X, a man in his mid-40s, is in court as a plaintiff, the defendants being church and state. He is claiming damages for mental and physical injuries, including sexual abuse, while in their custody or care, and his legal team want him to accept a no fault settlement; to take the money and run. While he waits to be heard, he reviews the life that has led him to this time and place.

It begins before birth, in the turmoil of the womb, extended to the external surroundings into which he is ejected. He is one of a large family, with quarrelling parents in a slum environment, and the prognosis is poor.

From the age of three, he is in trouble with the state, in a syndrome that will intensify with the years. Ahead of him lie detention houses, industrial schools, a mental hospital for criminals and prison.

As a young adult, he discovers musical and performing talents, and has a chance for a better life; but his demons and insecurities undermine him. He goes for a drink at 20 and returns at 40 with it all still to do. He had always thought that the authorities, in some perverse way, must have cared for him as a child. Now, having read his dossier, he knows they did not, but had simply abandoned him.

And here, within the walls of an institution that had oppressed him, he has decisions to make.

The author-actor has written his story movingly and well, and brings a considerable acting talent to its portrayal. He goes beyond the merely naturalistic in doing so, deploying a vocal and physical agility that encompasses a range of characters and situations, and commands laughter as well as empathy. There is more than stage entertainment here, but also no less.

Runs to October 12th; to book phone 01-6709202

Gerry Colgan

Lucy Kaplansky,

The Shelter, Dublin

Lucy Kaplansky is a New York out-of-Chicago folk singer whose profile has seemingly been damped down by a number of reasons: her integrity-fuelled independence for one, and the rise of many other less talented but perhaps better promoted singer-songwriters for another. Yet she refuses to be swayed from what appears to be her true course, which is to cut straight to the chase.

Playing in front of a small and partisan audience, Kaplansky cuts a small, precise figure on stage: blue jeans, dark jacket, a mop of long, curly hair, a cute face. She sings of the usual singer-songwriter concerns (love experienced, gained and lost in a myriad of situations) but is way above average in the way she adds sharp twists and turns. It's not so much that she's close to the bone, but rather the nerve endings that operate them.

Old favourites (End Of The Day, A Song About Pi, written by Kaplansky's mathematician father, Irving) are mixed in with new songs, two of which are just plain beautiful: This Is Home, and Land Of The Living. The former is a long distance love affair come home to roost, set amidst sparse, effective guitar chords and a melody to die for; the latter is a post-September 11th song that begins in a characteristically considered way and leads to a profoundly dramatic and surprising ending.

She closes the evening with a couple of encores, of which Song For Molly is the highlight. Concerning the issues of Alzheimer's ("It's a dirty trick, this growing old"), it's perhaps the archetypal Kaplansky song: exceptionally poignant, crafted and executed. It, and many others like it, sit side by side in her song-writing arsenal just waiting for the red button to be pushed. By God, she pushed a fair few in Dublin.

Tony Clayton-Lea

Callino String Quartet

Bray and Dublin

Last Friday the Callino String Quartet gave the first classical concert at Co Wicklow's new Mermaid Arts Centre in Bray, playing Haydn, Ravel and Beethoven. And on Monday, they repeated the Haydn and Beethoven at the Coach House in Dublin Castle, replacing the Ravel with the première of Raymond Deane's Equali, a work specially commissioned for them by the Music Network's Young Musicwide scheme, a career development initiative for young performers.

Deane's Equali is a five movement work which treats its raw material, the four notes of the treble clef spaces (FACE), to a range of presentations focused on specific technical devices, turning its gestures over and musing on them in a manner that ranges from reflective to aggressive.

The use of material which embodies both major and minor chords naturally results in the creation of tonal resonances, which the composer accepts in a mostly neutral way, apart from the swelling reiterations of C major just before the end, which he cuts off with an abruptly dissonant close.

The Callinos are almost old-fashioned introvertsas performers, and the jagged juxtapositions and gestural insistence of the Deane seemed to urge them into areas of expression that they might normally tend to avoid.

It was interesting to hear the works by Haydn (the Quartet in D, Op. 76 No. 5) and Beethoven (the Quartet in F, Op. 59 No. 1) in venues as different as the Mermaid and the Coach House.

The Mermaid is yet another black-box style theatre, in the design of which, although it's agreeably panelled in wood, not a moment's thought seems to have been given to the performance of unamplified music.

The Callinos performed on a curtained stage to an audience in a fully darkened auditorium, and from my right-of-centre seat near the front, the sound was muffled and weak.

The contrast with the Coach House, a fully-carpeted conversion job in which music was also unlikely to have been at the front of anyone's mind, couldn't have been more striking.

The audience was bathed in light, reinforcing the sense of contact with the players, and the sound travelled with an immediacy which was virtually unimaginable in the new Bray performing space.

The Callinos seem like naturals in the music of Haydn, which they played without hype or false rhetoric, so that the music seemed simply to speak for itself. Their Beethoven has a similar directness, and the appeal of their performance of the first Rasumovsky quartet was also strong, although, there were moments of transition, of shift and overlap, which were not yet judged accurately. Their Ravel was of that plain-speaking style which the composer so loved, and which allowed the work's especial richness of harmony to communicate without any recourse to interpretative exaggeration.

Michael Dervan