Irish Times writers review a selection of arts events.
John Squire, Temple Bar Music Centre, Dublin
By Ed Power
John Squire doesn't look much like a rock star, probably because it's been a while since he was one. Eight years after quitting The Stone Roses - Manchester's The Beatles and The Byrds rolled into one - their guitarist is in danger of becoming indie rock's forgotten genius, the occasional fumbling comeback merely underlining the elusive nature of his talent. Jilted by his muse, he slogs on in vain, like an abandoned lover camped on the porch, blindly convinced that his beau will return.
Squire's latest gambit has been to reinvent himself as a solo artist. You are immediately wary; great axe men do not usually bear up well in the limelight. Otherwise,what need would we have of lead singers, who covet attention for attention's sake and are glad to make buffoons of themselves?
And so it proves. In Ireland to plug his uneven new album, Marshall's House, Squire displayed all the magnetism of a used sock. Unkempt and slouching, he reminded you of a roadie forced to deputise for his boss at the last minute, someone far happier tuning guitars than playing them.
Initially, your misgivings seemed justified. His solo material is often lumpen and meandering, redolent of Oasis or Ocean Colour Scene at their brit-pap nadir. Squire's biggest problem is his singing voice: he hasn't got one. In its place is a foghorn grunt: guttural, tuneless and frightening. This skews his delivery; because Squire's vocals cannot soar, neither can his songs. Instead they shambled and sulked, no matter how urgently Squire's crisp four-piece backing band tried to coax them aloft.
Still, his knack for a memorable chord change hasn't completely deserted him. Summertime sounded cheerful and lilting; Time Changes Everything's killer licks culminated in a swaggering chorus.
A foray into the Roses' back catalogue further lifted the mood - at least until Squire opened his mouth again. He doesn't so much murder Ten Storey Love Song as whisk it off to his underground lair and torture it for days. Fool's Gold, meanwhile, swapped its ghostly shimmer for a bluesy plod. Only Waterfall, transcendent and impossibly lovely, and a gutsy, provocative Tight Rope retained their tingle.
It was just about enough to send you home breathless and elated, electrified with nostalgia. Squire's genius may have faded, but the Roses' beauty never will.
Roger Doyle in Concert, Project, Dublin
By Michael Dungan
Two very different Roger Doyles were on show at the composer's concert in Project on Saturday night.
Of the two there were just glimpses of the Doyle I know better, the composer whose painstaking and judicious recording, manipulation and editing of sounds since the 1970s rightly makes him the father of electronic music in this country.
The other Roger Doyle, who writes in pop style, was the one who dominated Saturday's concert, leaving this classical-music critic feeling a bit as though he'd turned up to review the wrong event.
Three Pieces For Pupils Who Don't Like Exams, from 1974, previewed the elements that would feature in Doyle's music throughout the programme: simplicity, sweetness, hints of jazz and the extensive use of repeating patterns.
For Salome's Dance, from his music for the Gate Theatre's 1988 production of Oscar Wilde's Salome, Doyle pared content to a minimum. Right-hand figures with an Irish traditional influence were accompanied by a conventional pop bass line like the one in Every Breath You Take, the 1983 hit for The Police.
These and the other pieces were faithful to the pop aesthetic, eschewing development in favour of repetition. It struck me as honest-to-goodness pop music, not especially remarkable, persuasively personal in delivery, rather uniform in mood.
Two guest performers widened the sound palette. Singer-songwriter Rebecca Collins skilfully and imaginatively manipulated her voice through a delay modeller as she sang her blood-drenched song cycle Red Delta Dream. Pieces by the composer Trevor Knight had a sub-Satie quality and titles whose relevance was by no means self-evident, such as The Spanish Armada Arrives In Stoneybatter.
The evening's only lively music was his La Théière Au Chocolat, for which Doyle, a drummer in his youth, contributed energetic electronic percussion.
Gastinel, RTÉ Concert Orchestra/Wagner, The Helix, Dublin
By Michael Dervan
Schubert/Webern - Deutsche Tänze D820; Schoenberg - Chamber Symphony No 1; Haydn - Cello Concerto No 1; Mozart - Symphony No 39
The RTÉ Concert Orchestra's new principal conductor, Laurent Wagner, has been winning plaudits for the way he has stirred up the orchestra's playing and repertoire. In the second of his Tales from Vienna programmes at The Helix on Saturday, however, the stirring produced very mixed results.
The evening's first half drew the orchestra into dangerous waters. Webern's orchestration of a set of German dances by Schubert was commissioned by Universal Edition to mark the rediscovery and publication of the dances in 1931, more than a century after they were originally composed.
The orchestral treatment is Schubertian in spirit, but, as Webern's own recording of them reveals, he also conceived them as a sort of chamber music on a large scale. Schoenberg's Chamber Symphony for 15 instruments of 1906 is also a form of chamber music, although its level of contrapuntal density is at the opposite end of the scale, and it's a piece that constantly threatens to burst at the seams.
Neither work, it must be said, sounded particularly comfortable for the RTÉ Concert Orchestra on Saturday. The Schubert was wanting in charm and flexibility and in the sheer savoir faire of chamber-music-making. The Schoenberg, in which the five string instruments are outnumbered two to one, is extremely challenging to balance, and Saturday's performance often had the air of a co-ordinated but not quite coherent babble.
The two performances after the interval were like those of a different group of musicians. The French cellist Anne Gastinel offered Haydn's C major Cello Concerto in a style that was tonally full and free and remained graceful by virtue of never being forced. Wagner and his players adopted a style to match, and the central adagio, with its strings-only accompaniment, lifted the music-making into a state of special raptness.
Mozart's late Symphony in E flat was sculpted with incisive rhythmic attack and sharply articulated phrasing. This symphony, which lies rather unfairly in the shadow of the two that followed it, the G minor and the Jupiter, here fairly throbbed with vitality.
Wagner sees Mozart as a composer with a real spring in his step, and his stylish handling of this music bodes well for an area of repertoire that's surely going to be central to his years at the helm of the RTÉ Concert Orchestra.
