Irish Times reviewers give their verdicts on musical and theatrical events in Dublin and Belfast
Wolfgang Holzmair (baritone), Russell Ryan (piano) at the Law Society
Austrian baritone Wolfgang Holzmair's song recital with US pianist Russell Ryan, presented by the Limerick Music Association at the Law Society, Blackhall Place on Saturday, has to count as one of the most unusual to be heard in Ireland in years. Just two composers were featured, with Holzmair choosing to set off songs from Ernst Krenek's Reisebuch aus den österreichischen Alpen and related settings from over a century earlier by Schubert.
Krenek charted his journey through the Austrian Alps in the 20 songs of his Reisebuch in just three weeks in July 1929, writing the words as well as the music out of the experience of his travels the previous month. The text is imbued with rural nostalgia, yet fully up-to-the-minute, for instance, in its contempt for the depredations of the tourist industry. But Krenek remained enough of a realist to register his homesickness as being a longing for the city rather than any fantasy about Alpine life.
The cycle is often neo-Schubertian in manner (a surprising stylistic detour for a composer who was to begin a 12-tone opera, Karl V, a year later), and it is this fact, surely, which encouraged Holzmair to make his unusual pairing.
Holzmair is one of those rare singers whose performance thrives on creating an illusion of the indissolubility of speech and song. Unlike most of his colleagues, who lean one way or the other, he is a musician who fully respects the words, and a communicator of words who unstintingly respects the music.
It's as if he's speaking while he sings, and not with the sculpted declamation of a stage actor, but with the milder inflection and familiar tone of friend to friend. He's not concerned to act out the suffering of a forlorn Schubertian lover. Instead, he sings as one who has known suffering, whose experience imbues his narrative with an emotion which captures all that needs to be said.
The effect of the Schubert/Krenek juxtapositions on Saturday was to draw Schubert closer to Krenek rather than the other way around.
This occurred although Russell Ryan's piano playing took a linear approach altogether less firmly harmonically anchored, and therefore more modern-sounding, than that of the composer himself.
The acoustic of the President's Hall of the Law Society sounded drier than usual, and there were moments of slight strain evident in the arches of Holzmair's phrasing.
But these did little to detract from the achievement of a singer whose style remains unique in the pleasures it affords.
Michael Dervan
The Chance at Stranmillis College Theatre, Belfast Festival
It's ll very unnerving. Three regular guys are seated at a table in a pub, playing cards and bantering among themselves. Meanwhile, on a huge grainy screen behind them, an extraordinary game show, hosted by a pale-eyed, squeaky voiced, robotic man is taking place amid hysterical audience excitement. It is The Fasta Lottery, run by the alien Fastalogians, whose random programme of genetic change, known as The Chance, is a highly subscribed and highly lucrative industry. The guys around the table pay no attention to what's on the screen. But the audience does.
Between watching the pulp on the box and trying to tune into the dialogue, our senses are pulled this way and that, we are thrown off balance and plunged into an unreal grasp of where we are and why we are here. This is the Orwellian divide and rule principal, employed to devastating effect by Peter Carey in his short story The Chance and again here in Jackie Doyle's accomplished adaptation. Design, story and music by Bell Helicopter work perfectly as a deceptively comforting wrap, with Carey's gallery of surreal and everyday figures moving smoothly across Terry Loane's massive, bleached driftwood set, backed by giant screened images of the ocean, the moving sun and scenes suggesting the eerie story behind the human compulsion to challenge the nature of love and beauty. In this world, barriers of past, present and future are blurred. We are stranded in a parallel reality, everywhere and nowhere.
At the heart of the experience, which tunes directly into contemporary society's current obsessions, is a doomed love affair between a beautiful revolutionary, Carla, and Paul, a man who played the lottery - and lost. As an older man, living with the consequences of his loss, Dave Anderson elegantly conveys a combination of resignation and jaundiced cynicism. Michael Wilson is his younger self, entranced by the bewitchingly lovely, cultured girl (Renee Weldon), who has fallen for his working class charms.
Despite his best efforts he is unable to prevent her following the path of her famous posh friends, whose every visit propels him into a greater sense of confusion and desperation. He becomes more isolated from his own circle of friends.
Meanwhile, Conleth Hill, Gee Williams and Kirstin Milward's once-beautiful, deformed presences impose themselves in various ways, offering an unexpected comfort blanket when events take the inevitable horrible turn. Doyle has made an admirable job of translating this complex story into a theatrical piece. The only surplus is a diversion into the disturbing paintings of the French artist Bonnard, who was also obsessed all his life with one woman. It may be a valid and aesthetically pleasing addition, but so rounded and complete is Carey's story in itself that the Bonnard supplement risks gilding the lily. Otherwise, however, this is a very fine piece of work, the icing on Prime Cut's 10th birthday cake.
Jane Coyle
A Christmas Carol at the Grand Opera House, Belfast
A decade after it was created, Northern Ballet Theatre's A Christmas Carol is as sharp and spicy a festive treat as it was when the collective genius of composer Carl Davis and artistic director, the late Christopher Gable, first fashioned it. Indeed, it has become something of a brand name, an annual mainstay of the repertoire, never failing to infuse audiences with a sense of wonder and well-being. Soloists have come and gone, but Jeremy Kerridge, for whom the role of Scrooge was created, is still occupying the central character with as much bile and expressive energy as ever - though he is due to retire in 2003, after 22 years with the company. In keeping with its name - and with equal emphasis on "theatre" as on "ballet" - NBT has frequently struck out in creative directions, from which more traditional companies would shy away. So, A Christmas Carol does not shirk from focusing on the dark side of Dickens, venturing into the bleak, dangerous back streets of Victorian London, where poverty, cruelty and deprivation were a way of life. And to the familiar ballet language of the body was added the language of the voice, through songs, carols and seasonal anthems, amalgamated into Davis's multi-textured orchestral score and sung live on stage by the large cast.
Nor is there a conventional balance of roles. The two leads are men - Kerridge's dazed Scrooge, sleep-walking through the Christmas Eve night that will change his crabbed persona forever, and Daniel de Andrade's irrepressible Bob Cratchet. Belfast's last sight of de Andrade was in a different guise, as the handsome jilted Don Jose in Carmen, alongside the dazzling Charlotte Talbot, who here features briefly and brightly as the wife of Scrooge's nephew. His tremendous verve finds an uncanny echo in Kerridge's final joyous affirmation, led by the three fantastical Christmas ghosts - the airy, wraith-like Past, the rock'n'roll dream-spinning Present and the massive, tattered Angel of Death that shows him how things could be if he does not change his ways.
The petite, graceful Chiaki Nagao is a delightful Belle, rejecting the stingy charms of Christopher Giles's Young Scrooge, while Adam Temple and Fiona Wallis provide some moments of pantomime humour as the jolly Fezziwigs.
Gift-wrapped, undemanding and, thanks to designer Lez Brotherston, absolutely fabulous to look at, this is a Christmas punch to warm the cockles of the heart.
A Christmas Carol is at theBelfast Grand Opera House until November 16th. Bookings on Belfast (0044 28) 90241919.
Jane Coyle
