The young Benjamin Britten's output was prodigious. By the age of 14 he had produced, in his own words, "reams and reams" of music - string quartets, sonatas for piano, violin, viola and cello, a large symphony, an oratorio - enough, in fact, to bring his tally of opus numbers up to 100.
RTÉ NSO/Zander
NCH, Dublin
Michael Dervan
Britten - Simple Symphony. Beethoven - Piano Concerto No 2. Brahms - Symphony No 2.
His mature Op 4, written at the age of 21, is a Simple Symphony based on material taken from works composed between the ages of nine and 12. The childhood associations often, which are made explicit in the movement titles ("Boisterous Bourée," "Playful Pizzicato," "Sentimental Sarabande," and "Frolicsome Finale"), act as a temptation for performers to treat the music with the sort of exaggerated lilt one associates with the metre-bound, rum-ti-tum recitation of poetry.
For Benjamin Zander, conducting the RTÉ/NSO on Friday, the music needed no extra layer of childish malarky, and it sounded all the better for it. Things may have been a little less chirpy than usual, but the musical skills of Britten, both as a boy and as a man, were communicated with greater substance.
Zander's solidity also informed the playing of Beethoven's Piano Concerto in B flat, and the soloist Philip Martin, whose forte lies outside the classical repertoire, adapted sensitively to the well-grounded approach.
Zander aspires to a style of conducting which encourages orchestral musicians to interact as if they were working on a piece of chamber music. He calls on them to listen more, and to take chamber-music-like risks in the moment of performance.
It's a tall order to get the players of this orchestra to lower their individual and collective voices so that conversational norms can replace the more heated discourse that is their norm.
Zander's approach in Brahms' Second Symphony was largely successful, though lapses from the first violins did obliterate the sound of the woodwind at times. His was a lightly-spoken Brahms, in which the knotty motivic arguments were presented with easy clarity and the prevailing gentleness made the winding up of excitement all the more thrilling.
There was not, however, the specially-charged atmosphere he brought to Mahler's Fifth for his Dublin début, though his pacing of the Brahms (which included the exposition repeat in the first movement) seemed geared to ensure that the music-making improved as the work progressed, and left an extremely positive impression at the end.
Soweto Kinch
Sugar Club, Dublin
Jim Carroll
Sax-star Soweto Kinch's Irish visit comes on the back on a tremendous 12 months for the young Birmingham-based player. Lauded with such critical acclaim as a Mercury Music Award nomination and various BBC Radio Jazz gongs for his "Conversations with the Unseen" album, the talented Kinch has been highlighted as a player to watch. While the "new Courtney Pine" tag may be somewhat onerous, these shows are an opportunity to further gauge Kinch's ability.
It's also a chance to hear just where he'll take the modern, urban contours of that album in a live setting. On record, hip-hop ideas and idioms sit snugly alongside Soweto's various bop and post-bop explorations.
Unlike many of the sample-heavy catastrophes which normally arise in this particular style-clash, Kinch's musical machinations produced lighter, more natural fare.
At this sold-out Dublin show, however, the rapping and hip-hop angles are largely sidelined in favour of playing on Kinch and his band's talents.
There was plenty to savour and much came from Kinch. Topping and tailing "The Flamethrower", for instance, with a colourful, dramatic, spiritual flourish, Kinch's playing has dexterity and lyricism.
While the band largely support Kinch's drive and direction, they're more than capable of making individual splashes, as seen in drummer Troy Miller's punchy patterns and guitarist Femi Temowo's languid lines on "Snakehips".
Closing the first set, "Jazz Planet" is a good-natured flight of fancy where Kinch raps about a universe where jazz is the law and how jazz musicians would run countries and governments if they had the chance.
While there can be few complaints about the quality of the music which preceded and followed "Jazz Planet", Kinch's playfulness with the form and tradition on that track makes you wonder just what else he could do in a similar vein if he set his mind to it. That, however, will only become clear with time.
Soweto Kinch is at the Trinity Rooms, Limerick tonight (Jan 26th); North Down & Ards Institute, Bangor (28th); Arts Centre, Downpatrick (29th); Arts Centre, Lisburn (30th); Market Place Theatre, Armagh (31st) and Arts Centre, Portstewart (Feb 1st).
Guy Clark
Temple Bar Music
Centre, Dublin
Siobhán Long
He's one of a dying breed. Musicians who measure their success, not by volume, but by the quality of their song distillations. Like whisky, the longer the distillation, the purer the drop. Guy Clark has never been one to churn out albums; his work is closer aligned to the modulations of his intestine than to lunar cycles or Gregorian calendars. And when the songs owe more to gut feelings than record company bottom lines, somehow you know that they've got a helluva better chance of lasting the pace.
It's been a while since Clark paid us a visit, and he greeted us with an uncustomed broad grin, evidently happy to be back - in Dublin - on a freezing night in January. Accompanied by the superb Verlon Thompson on guitar, Clark contentedly trawled through his back catalogue, following a picaresque trail dictated by his audience, and treated us all to a slew of fine new material too, tucked neatly in his last album, 2002's The Dark.
His hard-won advice to eight-year-olds and 80-year-olds everywhere to Always Trust Your Cape was the opener that had his audience eating out of the palm of his hands in three short minutes.
This time round somehow Clark's dry humour picked its way through his songs with greater ease than before. Like all good Texans, he might have a crease in his jeans but his songs were as wrinkled as Dustin Hoffman's Little Big Man - and how he knew it ('I got these lines in my face/Trying to straighten out the wrinkles in my life'). Wisdom and experience combined to produce such gems as Boats To Build, Cis Draper and Let 'Em Roll, but it was sheer fiery imagination that fuelled Soldier's Joy, a tale of war in the days before medicine helped dull the grunt's experience.
His tonsillar voice, partnered with Thompson's complex picking on guitar, mined gem after gem. Of course we got Desperadoes Waiting For A Train and Fried Green Tomatoes. And lots more besides. It was so good, we hardly noticed that he hadn't aired The Randall Knife. Clark has so many gems he can't air them all in one night anymore.
Ulster Orchestra/ Kenneth Montgomery
Ulster Hall, Belfast
Dermot Gault
Poulenc - Les Biches. Organ Concerto. Saint-Saëns - Danse macabre. Symphony No 3.
This concert showcased both the Ulster Hall's Mulholland Grand Organ, built by William Hill in the 1860s and subsequently modified, and the virtuosity of Gillian Weir, soloist in the Poulenc concerto and key contributor to the Saint-Saens symphony. The Muholland organ is just the instrument for these works, providing full-toned Gothic grandeur for the opening of the Poulenc and the closing pages of the Saint-Saens.
The lowest notes vibrated softly through the soles of the feet, making the sort of physical impact which can only be heard in live performance, but one was also struck by how sparingly the organ was deployed in both works, and how skilfully Gillian Weir blended with the orchestra.
Montgomery kept the music on the move.
He was at his best in the scherzo section of the symphony. There could have been more Parisian elegance in the 1939 ballet suite from Les Biches, more sense of mystery in the Danse macabre, and more delicacy in the Poco Adagio of the symphony, where the simple-seeming passage for violins alone somehow wasn't as ethereal as it shouldhave been.
However, the positive approach of both conductor and soloist paid off in the clearly focused performance of the Poulenc Organ Concerto, a work which can seem amorphous.
