Norwegian violinist Henning Kraggerud stood in for the indisposed Vadim Repin in Brahms's Violin Concerto with the National Symphony Orchestra on Friday.
Henning Kraggerud (violin), William Dowdall (flute), NSO/Gerhard Markson
National Concert Hall, Dublin
Violin Concerto..........Brahms
Density 21.5...............Varése
Symphony No 3 (Nowak, 1889)...........Bruckner
The change of performer took some listeners by surprise (the fact of the substitution was not flagged at the concert), but the switch was not registered as a disappointment.
Kraggerud's gutsy playing made clear why his first Irish appearances, in Galway and Limerick four years ago with the Stavanger Symphony Orchestra, were so much lauded.
Kraggerud really took the bit between his teeth in the Brahms, and threw himself into the task of milking every last drop of heightened emotion from the music. That meant that even those passages where the soloist has been allotted accompanying figurations were mightily teased for an expressive yield.
The musical balance may occasionally have sounded upside-down in the process, and Kraggerud's control of intonation put under strain, but the performance didn't have a dull moment to it, and the audience was unstinting in voicing its appreciation at the end.
It was a cheap gesture of conductor Gerhard Markson to run the two works of the second half together without a break. The seamless sequencing of Varése's Density 21.5 for solo flute (played with artful concentration from a side-balcony by William Dowdall) and Bruckner's Third Symphony provided the sort of musical shock that could be provided by any number of such chalk and cheese juxtapositions.
Bruckner's Third is, of course, the symphony which caused the composer the greatest trouble. This is not just a matter of the tortuous revision process to which it was subjected, and which has left scholars to argue over the influence of the various participants. There was also the dedication ("to the Master, Richard Wagner, in deepest respect"), which brought down on Bruckner the wrath of Wagner's enemies. And the 1877 premiére with the Vienna Philharmonic under the composer himself has gone down as one of the great disasters of musical history.
Markson's view of Bruckner in this work seemed exactly the opposite of the description once given by the great German conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler: "A gothic mystery stranded in the middle of the 19th century." Using Leopold Nowak's edition of the compact, 1889 version of the score, Markson traded mystery for directness and urgency, in an account where analytical clarity yielded clean, brass-bright lines, and a gait with a mighty thrust. - Michael Dervan
Crash Ensemble
IMMA, Dublin
Industry................Michael Gordon
Interference..........Judith Ring
Splitting 8.1..........Michael Maierhof
La lontananza nostalgica utopica futura...............Nono
The second concert in the Crash Ensemble's current series at the Irish Museum of Modern Art was a winner. The opening piece was Industry, composed in 1993 by the American, Michael Gordon (b.1956), for amplified cello. Its economy leaves the soloist exposed, and Ekhard Schwarz-Schulz's perfectly timed playing was both technically admirable and full of character.
Judith Ring's Interference, written for mezzo-soprano Natasha Lohan and four-channel tape, was receiving its first performance. This young Irish composer (b. 1976) is never seduced by the richness of electronic tools. Progress from "raw, almost unmanipulated material" (her description) towards increasingly complex "musical results" is uncompromising; and the vocal part, designed more for effects than line, works strikingly with and against the electronic sounds. It was excellently performed too.
In Splitting 8.1 by the German composer Michael Maierhof (b. 1956), discourse between recorded sound and solo clarinet - impeccably played by Ruth Hickey - is punctuated by long silences and by intermittent, fleeting video images taken from TV advertisements. Its mixture of calculation and iconoclasm leave you wondering. But it works.
Luigi Nono wrote La lontananza nostalgica utopica futura shortly before his death in 1990. It is a sort of musical journey, with the solo violinist moving freely between eight, nine or 10 spatially separated music stands, and choosing the passages to be played. The eight-channel tape recorded by Berio and violinist Gidon Kremer includes similar choices, so that the violinist and sound manipulator are equal protagonists. This performance, with the roles taken respectively by David O'Doherty and Jürgen Simpson, was far more intimate than Kremer's famous recording. But it was still captivating - a subtle combination of extraordinarily sophisticated sound, leisurely theatre and perpetual discovery, which felt much shorter than the 40 minutes it lasted. - Martin Adams
The Fast Show Live
Point Theatre, Dublin
Ooh, suit you badly, sir. TV's quickfire sketch show has packed up all its catchphrases and gone walkabout, bringing such popular characters as Competitive Dad, Swiss Toni, Bob Fleming, Colin Hunt and Rowley Birkin QC to the unfamiliar setting of the live stage. It's an ill-fitting suit, but the fine cast - Paul Whitehouse, Charlie Higson, Simon Day, Arabella Weir and Mark Williams - wear this threadbare brand well.
There's a fiendishly clever Fast Show sketch about a vaudeville comic, Arthur Atkinson, whose resolutely unfunny routines elicit gaels of laughter from the audience. The problem with watching The Fast Show live is, will their well-known catchphrases draw a Pavlovian response from the crowd at the Point, regardless of whether the sketches are funny or not?
As if to breed familiarity right from the off, Ken and Kenneth, the nudge-nudging gentlemen's outfitters, come right out with some straight-up innuendo, asking the men in the audience if they've been to a certain lap-dancing club in Dublin's city centre. Obviously, someone has done their research. Later, different characters will mention Sherriff Street, Eamonn Dunphy and paedophile priests, but it's not that easy to ingratiate yourself with an Irish crowd, as Colin Hunt discovered when asked by a heckler to do an impression of Mary Harney. That shut the irritating little git up alright.
Many of the characters are reassuringly unaltered from their TV incarnations, but some have plainly tried to move on and change their ways, only to inevitably slip back into their disordered personalities. Some of the sketches have been fused together, their incongruity often adding to the hilarity.
Ted And Ralph remains the funniest - and most poignant - sketch in the Fast Show canon, and Whitehouse and Higson plainly relish the chance to act out this tragi-comedy of manners onstage.
The Fast Show is quickly losing its sheen, overshadowed by increasingly brilliant comedies like The Office and The League Of Gentlemen, but it still has its classic moments.- Kevin Courtney
