Douglas Sealy was at the BoI Arts Centre where Eckart Schwartz-Schultz (cello) confounded expectations of a performance of Hindemith's Sonate for Violoncello solo, Op 25 No 3 with great beauty and much feeling. Dermot Gault enjoyed the new orchestral seating arrangements in the Ulster Hall, Belfast where Kenneth Montgomery led the Ulster Orchestra.
Eckart Schwartz-Schultz (cello), Katherine O'Malley (dancer), BoI Arts Centre, Dublin
Sonate for Violoncello solo, Op 25 No 3........................ Hindemith
Spiegel im Spiegel for cello and tape ............................... Pärt
Epithalamium 2 and 1 ......................................... Kevin O'Connell
Crow's Vanity ...................................................... Benjamin Dwyer
Hindemith was a viola player and was often made the butt of jokes by his brother who played the cello; so Hindemith, to get his revenge, wrote this cello sonata which is hard to play, inevitably sounds ugly and is at times a meaningless assemblage of notes. Thus Schwartz-Schultz gave us to understand in his genial spoken introduction, and then confounded our expectations by a performance of great beauty and much feeling. Working with him, the dancer Katherine O'Malley had devised a solo dance which translated the music into gesture and action, at one moment storming the heavens, at another in an abject prostration - but always full of dynamism. I found my attention monopolised not only by the dancer but also by the shadow cast by her body on the end wall. This shadow play was like an antique frieze brought to life by the music.
Cellist and dancer had many ideas for Spiegel im Spiegel, but in the end they were all discarded and the cello on its own played those simple meditative phrases, characteristic of Pärt, that can mean all or nothing, accompanied by simple arpeggios on the tape, while the stage remained empty.
In the two short Epithalamiums by Kevin O'Connell, the dancer sat on the edge of the stage holding a bouquet of narcissi, the petals of which she plucked and laid on her shoulders, an action which in no way rivalled the interest of the music.
Dwyer's Crow's Vanity, cello echoing itself on tape, was more angular in its dance, but it was hard to relate to the totem of Ted Hughes. - Douglas Sealy
Ulster Orchestra, Kenneth Montgomery, Ulster Hall, Belfast
Finlandia .............................................................................. Sibelius
Piano Concerto in A minor ............................................ Schumann
Symphony No 4 in F minor .........................................Tchaikovsky
Kenneth Montgomery presented us with what is, I believe, a new orchestral seating for this concert: violins divided left and right, cellos behind the firsts and (the novel element) double basses split between the two sides of the orchestra.
From where I was sitting, it worked very well; the string tone was warm and clear and the double basses made more impact than usual. The conventional seating bunches all the violins together and relegates the basses to the side of the orchestra, where most of their tone is lost.
One couldn't help wishing, however, that Montgomery had taken the opportunity to coax more nuances out of his string section. In the quieter moments of the symphony his main goal seemed to be to maintain a consistent tempo, while in the second movement his evident concern that the music should not drag took precedence over its plaintive character. The louder moments were certainly robust; if the opening of Finlandia could have been more assertive, one couldn't make the same complaint about the finale of the symphony.
Mikhaïl Rudy was more at home in his encore, Chopin's Nocturne in D flat, than in the Schumann Concerto, which never really recovered from a patch of drifting ensemble in the second movement. In the first movement, his attention to inner detail made some points, but much of the work's delicacy passed him by and, on the whole, Rudy did not seem to have much to say about this particular work. - Dermot Gault
