Holland can sure throw a party. Anyone who has had his exuberant music programme Later in their living room knows that his weekly soirees gather the finest guests eclectically around his piano, united in their capability and credibility.
Manon Lescaut
Wexford Festival
Michael Dervan
The music of Daniel-François-Esprit Auber (1782-1871) survives in public performance these days, it is mostly a matter of an overture here, an aria there.
But Auber, who was born in the year Mozart wrote his Haffner Symphony and died when Debussy was aged nine, was a giant in the France of his time.
He is a composer with that lightness of touch long associated with the genre of opéra comique, a genre which he did so much to enrich, even providing in his Manon Lescaut the third of this year's operas at the Wexford Festival, the onstage death of a heroine in advance of Bizet's similar treatment of Carmen.
The lightness of opéra comique is something which doesn't come easily to today's performers, who are used to heavier dynamics and a style of deeper emotional probing.
Wexford's Manon, the Ukrainian soprano Marina Vyskvorkina, showed she has the vocal appeal for the role, the easy high notes and also the agility, but sadly not yet the intonational accuracy to turn Auber's florid writing into the star turn it ought to be.
The composer's long-time librettist, Eugène Scribe, provided far more scope for Manon's unwelcome pursuer, the Marquis d'Hérigny, than for the true object of her affections, the Chevalier des Grieux.
The casting at Wexford reflects this in the imposing d'Hérigny of Luca Salsa and the ineffectually under-powered Des Grieux of Alexander Swan.
Auber's music needs all the help it can get. The writing is tuneful and lively, but some of the composer's knee-jerk responses tread a dangerous line - as, for instance, when a sorrowful turn into a minor key is then decorated with potentially flippant-seeming embellishments.
Conductor Jean-Luc Tingaud didn't manage to keep things on a tight rein, and singers and orchestra were not always well co-ordinated.
The work's direction team, Jean-Philippe Clarac and Olivier Deloeuil, seemed to have difficulty taking the piece seriously, and even managed to provoke audience laughter at the work's expense.
The designer, Greco, offered stylish period costumes in a setting that mostly seemed unduly cramped. Froth with such a questionable taste is hardly a froth worth tasting at all.
The Wexford Festival continues until Sunday, November 3rd. Details and booking from 053-22144
Wexford Festival Opera Concerts
Martin Adams
This year's offerings in Wexford Festival Opera's weekend concerts include three programmes which each appear twice. Dates for the diary include November 3rd, when a choral and orchestral concert features the Wexford Festival Singers in music by Bach and Mozart; October 26th and November 2nd, when the Prague Chamber Choir will sing music by Dvorak, Janacek, Novak and Petr Eben; and October 27th and 28th, when the concerts presented on the first weekend will be repeated.
Rowe Street Church was full for the orchestral concert last Saturday afternoon.
In Mendelssohn's Hebrides Overture the fierce accelerandos exceeded anything one could infer from the composer's markings. It was as if Paolo Arrivabeni, who also directs Mercadante's Il giuramento in the main opera programme, was striving for dramatic possibilities.
In this piece and in the same composer's Italian Symphony, hard driving put the players of the National Philharmonic Orchestra of Belarus under pressure. And I have never heard Glinka's Ruslan and Ludmila Overture taken at such a ferocious pace!
The bouts of frantic and ragged playing proved oddly enjoyable, partly because of the players' eagerness. More unalloyed for pleasure were the orchestra's characterful playing of the symphony's middle movements and, above all, a strongly shaped account of Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker Suite No. 1, which is perfectly suited to an east-European orchestral sound, and which Paolo Arrivabeni paced with balletic poise.
Don Juan . . . Don Quixote: Love and Desire in the Art Songs of Spain got its first airing on Sunday morning in White's Barn. Devised by Rosetta Cucchi and the festival's artistic director Luigi Ferrari, this is a winner in concept and performance. It includes several songs from that unique Spanish form of musical theatre, the zarzuela, plus collections by Granados, Rodrigo, Falla and others.
Falla is head and shoulders above everyone else; but everything is well worth hearing - so stylish, and brimming with character.
The format allows the five singers to engage in a little light-hearted acting. Soprano Ermonela Jaho, mezzo Elena Traversi, tenor David Curry, baritone Luca Salsi and bass Simone Alberghini were a well-matched group, vocally reliable and with plenty of stylistic flair.
Rosetta Cucchi's colourful, perfectly timed piano playing was as good a specimen of accompaniment as I have heard in a long time. Anyone who missed this gem can hear it again next Sunday.
Jools Holland
National Stadium, Dublin
Peter Crawley
Equally, anyone familiar with such get-togethers would admit that the host himself is never the main attraction.
In concert, the south London ivory-tinkler and his expansive Rhythm 'n' Blues Orchestra certainly get the party started, but for all the elegance, proficiency and classy musical trimmings, it feels like nobody interesting ever shows up.
As a jazz pianist, Holland's fluttering fingers exude a dexterity to die for, while his left hand's penchant for boogie-woogie bass patterns supply a slick and steady pulse.
But while he knows those 88 keys like the back of his hand, a similar effortlessness as bandleader rarely affords his brass line-up enough room to swing freely.
Funnelled onto the small stage, the orchestra resemble a big band trapped in an elevator, while at another point pianos cram against one another like rush-hour in a music shop.
"Very nice to see you all in this boxing arena," announced Holland, with a little pugilism behind his thin tones, before Sam Brown matched her soulful voice to the George Harrison penned Horse To The Water.
Although Brown's verve could blast even the 12-strong brass section out of the water, her role is largely confined to a tambourine-toting cameo, leaving Holland's phlegmatic approach to the keys to dominate his singing and compositions.
The night is saved, however, when the audience relaxes into the kind of party Holland really had in mind.
As uninhibited guests throw shapes by the stage to uncomplicated swathes of blues, ska, jazz and soul, for them, at least, Holland is once again the host with the most.
Darren Hayes
Vicar St, Dublin
Peter Crawley
In a newly renovated Vicar St, now large enough for Darren Hayes to holler "Hello Dublin!" without prompting a single laugh, Dublin is required to nurse him through a painful break-up. With Hayes billed as "the voice of Savage Garden", ex-Gardener Daniel Jones must truly have been the music.
It's over a year since Australia's earnest, drippy answer to Roxette went their separate ways. "It wasn't that I left the band," said Hayes at the time, "the band left me."
Coasting by on his former success, Hayes's candid but bloodless new songs run the gamut of emotional recovery through disappointment, recrimination, insecurity and ultimately forgiveness.
Following an inspiringly incongruous support act (blip-hop maniacs Specificus), Hayes's first ploy is to simply exhibit himself to an idolising crowd in his leather jacket, blond highlights and aviator shades.
Shrieks of ecstasy mark the attendance as either Savage Garden's faithful or Top Gun recreationsists.
But although screamed assurances permeate the mild stalker-anthem Creeping up on You through to a funk-pop flirty Dirty, it isn't until a chance quote from Nelly's Hot in Herre that the crowd call an effusive response: "So take off all your clothes."
Musically and stylistically, Hayes has teleported back to the 1980s, returning with keyboard-heavy pop and frequent recourse to the Michael Jackson echelons of falsetto sincerity, while Crush's segue into Madonna's Holiday is as comfortable as a pair of leg-warmers.
Patently unfamiliar with the new material, Hayes's acolytes devour every Savage Garden inclusion from a stirringly simple To the Moon and Back and a souped-up I Want You, to a saccharine I Knew I Loved You.
"I love these songs," the endearingly sensitive Hayes pouts forlornly. It's enough to make you supportively call back, "Don't worry Darren, you're better off without him!". Not that you'd mean it.
