Irish Times critics review Birdie Birdie in Sligo, pianist Alfred Brendel and the NCH and the RTÉ Philharmonic Choir.
Birdie Birdie, The Factory Performance Space, Sligo
Michael Harding's new play for Blue Raincoat Theatre Company presents four characters in search of significance. Echoes of Ionesco, Sartre and Beckett abound; the enclosed world presented on an almost bare stage is literally airless. The characters - a bed-bound woman, her uniformed nurse/jailor and hunchbacked manservant - are fighting for oxygen. This could almost be a parody of an existentialist play except that there is no sense of distance from, or commentary on, the genre - and there's certainly no humour.
Instead, it seems like a parody of a Blue Raincoat production.
The bed-ridden Birdie is yearning for her lover, whom she may or may not have killed. When he appears, dressed like Blazes Boylan in Edwardian boater and striped blazer, she woos him in breathy Molly Bloom fashion, rising and swaying on the bed. Both she and the nurse are sexually needy parodies of femininity - one passive, the other dominant - while the manservant is a gothic grotesque.
Under Niall Henry's direction the characters pirouette and hover, creating the choreographed tableaux that are the hallmark of this company's style, intoning their lines with high-pitched intensity. Declamation is substituted for drama. The culmination, if it could be called that, is the dunking of a telephone into a chamber-pot, whose contents are later poured on the ground.
Bodily functions are given enormous emphasis as if scatology implies eschatology.
This all seems a backward step for Blue Raincoat and a disappointing piece by Harding, whose most recent play, Swallow, performed by the author at last year's Dublin Fringe Festival, had memorable dramatic force. The absence of any context here deprives the writing of the weight it is striving towards. Contrary to the programme notes' suggestion, we don't learn "what it means to be human"; just how long 80 minutes can seem. - Helen Meany
Alfred Brendel (piano), NCH, Dublin
Mozart/Stadler - Fantasia in C minor K396.
Sonata in B flat K281.
Sonata in E flat K282.
Schubert - Drei Klavierstücke D946.
Beethoven - Sonata in E Op 109.
It's not that easy to pinpoint the difference between Alfred Brendel's playing in the first, all-Mozart half of his recital at the NCH on Saturday, and the Schubert and Beethoven of the second half. But the difference was as clear in the nature of the audience's response as it was in the playing itself.
Brendel is a performer who takes nothing for granted, who never gives the impression that, even for a fleeting bar or two, he's relaxed into auto-pilot mode. Mind, heart and finger are ever alert, and independently so, in spite of the constant communication between them.
He's not one of those performers you'll find succumbing to the tempting periodicity of patterns which can assert themselves through what the printed page presents to the eye, or shaping the music on the basis of what conforms most comfortably to the hand.
In Saturday's three works by Mozart, this ensured that the surface of the music was rarely allowed to seem unruffled, that what you might call the subtexts were given the sort of prominence that many another performer might eschew.
The result was rich and complex, particularly rewarding in the rhetoric of the Fantasia that Abbé Stadler recreated out of an incomplete movement for piano and violin, and also in the finales of the two sonatas which drew chuckles of contentment from the audience.
Yet there was an impression of a certain distance between performer and music in the Mozart which was entirely dispelled in the second half, leading the audience to voice its approval with altogether greater intensity.
The three late piano pieces by Schubert are deserving of a place alongside the Impromptus and Moments Musicaux as early examples of the sort of romantic piece which Liszt described as being "designed to portray subjective and profound emotion". Brendel responded willingly, and with a sense of full identity with the composer, to the music's shifting moods, from storm to dreaminess, from lyricism to wit.
Beethoven's Sonata in E, Op. 109, was equally fine, carried off with a blend of inevitability and freshness that left one momentarily transfixed, feeling that this sublime music could never be made to sound so complete in any other way.
Brendel is famously careful about his choice of encores, and after the Beethoven he offered just one, Schubert's Impromptu in G flat delivered with mesmerising autumnal richness. - Michael Dervan
RTÉ Philharmonic Choir, RTÉ NSO/Anissimov, NCH, Dublin
Tchaikovsky - Festival Coronation March.
Coronation Cantata, Moscow.
1812 Overture.
Prokofiev - Alexander Nevsky.
It was good at the National Concert Hall on Friday to hear Alexander Anissimov, conductor emeritus of the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra, back on top form.
His all-Russian programme was a most unusual one, ending the first half in the sonic blaze and blast of Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture. That choice was presumably governed by having opted to open the evening with two of the little-known works the composer was commissioned to write in connection with the coronation of Alexander III in 1883, just a year after the 1812 Overture had been commissioned to commemorate the Russian victory over Napoleon.
The second half also consisted of a piece composed to order, the cantata Prokofiev created out of his music for Eisenstein's 1938 film, Alexander Nevsky.
Anissimov's approach to an evening steeped in Russian history and patriotism was to encourage music-making that was as full-bodied in terms of sonority as it was in terms of fervour.
The orchestra played the coronation march as if they thought it was a real humdinger, and the contribution of the RTÉ Philharmonic Choir in the cantata was equally persuasive.
The firm-voiced mezzo soprano Oksana Bondareva and the stentorian baritone Vladimir Petrov were the soloists in the Tchaikovsky cantata.
And Bondareva, one of those mezzos who sounds comfortable and of one voice throughout her range, reinforced the positive impression she made here with her touching contribution to the Prokofiev.
In normal circumstances it would have been the Prokofiev, brooding, sentimental, brutal and triumphant, which would have been expected to bring the house down. But on this occasion that had already been done before the interval in the no-holds-barred account of the 1812 Overture, which brought segments of the audience leaping to their feet. - Michael Dervan
