Irish Times writers review the Mark Morris Dance Group at the Abbey Theatre and the Vogler Spring Festival at St Columba's Church, Drumcliffe, in Co Sligo.
Mark Morris Dance Group
Abbey Theatre
Michael Seaver
If the customer is always right then Tuesday night's performance by the Mark Morris Dance Group was a resounding success, but if the opening night of this year's festival was seen as an opportunity for dance to take to the Abbey stage and boast rather than pander, then it seemed less so. Three crowd-pleasers made up the bulk of the programme and, with the help of the choreographer's penchant for music visualisation or "mickey-mousing", offered uncomplicated viewing alongside feel-good themes.
In Serenade the musicians and music are given importance by being placed onstage and in direct dialogue with the choreographer's solo dancing. Although some of the sharpness is gone, Morris can still command the stage with joyousness and strength.
Seated on a box, those infamously articulate arms quiver and ripple, energising his torso and legs before light-footedly taking to the floor. With castanets, finger cymbals and a short copper pipe the ever-changing movement alludes to flamenco through to haka and whirling dervish, while exuding the warmth of a personal tribute to composer Lou Harrison.
With equal doses of camp and coyness Going Away Party and A Spell represented the irreverent side of Morris's output. "This is a dream I'm telling goodbye," sang Bob Willis and the Texas Playboys as the party flanked sex and love with imaginary rows of urinals. Nostalgia was magnified by the faux-country steps and sequences that played up the lyrics as much as possible, while in A Spell the earnestness of John Wilson's love songs offered a twee springboard to Cupid and the lovers.
After this, the textural variation in the 1993 Grand Duo was welcome with a more substantial and satisfying example of the choreographer's complete grasp of construction for large groups of dancers. The 14 dancers created a sense of community by tracing circles with unison movement, morphing and splitting into smaller groups. Although stifled by the confines of the Abbey stage, it still had beautifully elastic phrases and wound itself up to a stomping and slapping finale that hinted at some of the more meaty offerings yet to come in this year's festival.
Vogler Spring Festival
St Columba's Church, Drumcliffe, Co Sligo
Michael Dungan
A juicy, ultra-romantic piece by the 19th-century French composer Ernest Chausson had the effect of a thunderstorm breaking at the foot of Benbulben during the Vogler Spring Festival.
Chausson's strangely-scored Concert for piano, violin and string quartet is like turbo-charged César Franck, with its impassioned, heart-on-the-sleeve solo violin, orchestrally-conceived quartet-writing, and its lavish, seemingly ceaseless end-to-end arpeggios in the piano.
Just when you think no further climax is possible, another even bigger one comes along.
It received a spectacular performance of unswerving commitment from pianist Charles Owen, violinist Antje Weithaas, and festival hosts the Vogler Quartet. The audience, which seemed in two minds whether to cry or laugh, erupted. And this explosively emotional piece, looking as though it had dropped by parachute into a nine-concert festival programme where it was stylistically quite alien to nearly everything else, was suddenly the touchstone for the whole weekend.
The thunderstorm effect was one of release. The Chausson - new to many, being awkward to programme and therefore rarely performed - got everyone talking. They had been talking already, of course, but now the opinions flowed freely, above all on the festival's two featured composers, Mozart and Bartók.
Bartók's cycle of six string quartets is the most important contribution to the quartet repertoire since Beethoven, and its 39-year span encompasses the Hungarian composer's creative maturity. Each one reveals new ideas and developments against the backdrop of essential elements common to all six. His use of folk music, his shifting approach to classical forms, his response to outside influences, and his unique voice are common threads which were all the more apparent in the context of a complete cycle over four consecutive days.
The Voglers subverted chronology by starting with the last quartet.
Despite representing the composer's farewell to the medium, the Sixth contains enough rhythmic excitement to masquerade as a festival-opener. The Voglers proved equally at home in the constant sharp contrast within the Sixth - in which each movement begins slowly - and the softer contours of the Second, the last to betray any obvious romantic influence.
If it was a little strange to open with the valedictory Sixth, there was the advantage of hearing it in close proximity to the First, performed later by the Callino Quartet. The Callinos, although firmly established and well able to hold their own in the company of the Voglers, remain youthful, zesty and fresh. These attributes were well aired as the players plotted the First Quartet's journey from lament - Bartók composed it between 1908 and 1910 while suffering the aftermath of his broken relationship with the violinist Stefi Geyer - to its wild, cathartic dance of defiance at the end.
There is no such romantic discourse in the Third, the Callino's other contribution to the cycle. It was composed in 1927 and reflects the experimentation, astringency and concentration which characterised much of Bartók's work in the 1920s, as well as his regard for Alban Berg. The Callinos gave clear and lively articulation to the music's concise motivic material. They produced a kind of hungry momentum which brought this intense, 15-minute piece to a powerful conclusion.
Up-and-coming English pianist Charles Owen was involved in noteworthy performances of the festival's two other Bartók works. He brought the same electric aggression he unleashed in the 1926 Piano Sonata - natural successor to the infamous Allegro Barbaro of 1911 - to the 1938 Contrasts, a piece commissioned by the American jazz clarinettist and band leader Benny Goodman. Owen was well matched for adrenaline and colour by two German musicians, violinist Antje Weithaas and clarinettist Nina Janssen.
The Vogler's hard-driven and exciting performance of Bartók's Fourth Quartet - with its snapping pizzicato, eerie glissandi and menacing col legno - followed immediately on the heels of Mozart's C minor Wind Serenade, K388. Embedded within this masterpiece of instrumental colouring and combining is music every bit as concerned with motivic intricacy and contrapuntal ingenuity as the Bartók. But while the issues were similar, the results were thrillingly different.
The Wind Serenade - along with other works involving wind including Janácek's Mládí and two pieces by Mozart, the Divertimento in B flat, K287 and the Quintet for piano and wind - provided an opportunity for a new generation of Irish players to prove their mettle alongside more established colleagues. Bassoonist Peter Whelan, horn-player John Ryan, oboist Rebecca Halliday and flautist Riona O'Duinnín - most of whom hold important orchestral posts in Britain and on the continent - looked and sounded entirely assured mixed in with the London Sinfonietta's Gareth Hulse, the London Mozart Players' Gareth Newman, and the German clarinettist and conductor Helge Harding. As he always does, leading Irish bass-player Malachy Robinson demonstrated a sure feel for the delicate balances of chamber music.
Seóirse Bodley's specially-commissioned String Quartet No 3, Ave atque Vale, seeks to combine the theme of leave-taking - both in general and with respect to the Vogler's imminent departure from their five-year Sligo residency - with music which is governed in large measure by tone-row techniques.
In a pre-concert public interview with Michael Dervan, Bodley explained how he never feels bound by any system he uses, and that the rigours of his 16-note row are slightly alleviated by including four notes which he sometimes chooses to dispense with. The limited freedom which he permitted himself, however, cannot account for the extraordinary mastery which heexerts over both material and technique in order to produce music of truly piercing sadness.
