Irish Times writers review a selection of music and arts events
Rain, Abbey Theatre
Dancer and dance were one in the curtain calls for Rosas's performance of Rain at the Abbey on Friday night. Choreographer Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker was otherwise engaged and so it was the performers alone who received a thoroughly deserved acclamation for their committed virtuosity.
But in lots of ways it was the work itself that was the star, its perfect balance of satisfying intellect and visceral physicality fulfilling both head and heart.
De Keersmaeker is tireless in her pursuit of new choreographic structures and variations, particularly in relation to music. With Steve Reich's Music for Eighteen Musicians confidently co-existing with rather than seasoning the movement, she constructs large and small-scale correspondences that blend to a synergistic result.
She sets up a basic duality with a male and female phrase: one with short tight movements and straight-legged kicks with flexed feet, the other skipping with soft sweeping arms. While this division seems obvious, almost old-fashioned, these distinctions soon slip away as the phrases are endlessly deconstructed, although a certain amount of division remains between the movements of each gender.
Variations take place not just within the body, but more importantly within the space. Like a lop-sided kaleidoscope there are constantly shifting spatial patterns based around spirals.
Running to trace these sweeping spirals the dancers might suddenly break into individuals moving in straight lines. With glances and smiles they remain bonded as a group of people, not just instruments for choreography. Subtle costume changes alter the mood, as do the palate-cleansing walks in a long line across the entire space, which sweep the stage clean of any afterimages. Jan Versweyveld's lighting (similarly kaleidoscopic) and set of hanging ropes that shimmer when touched, embrace the performers in a setting that is warm and comforting as well as abstract.
In spite of obvious technical demands the nine performers never flag or release attention from the audience or each other. The sense of community that is created onstage reaches out to the auditorium and in the end it was reciprocated through the warmth and sincerity of the applause. - Michael Seaver
Cher, The Point, Dublin
Two hundred and three shows into her Farewell Tour, Cher obviously isn't averse to long goodbyes. And with over four decades of the eerily well-preserved diva's career to recap before she retires to Vegas or sitcoms or wherever, there are delirious summits of extravagance to ascend.
Sporting a demure ringmaster/pimp ensemble, Cher daintily defines the tour design with an illustrative whip crack: "fishnets and sleaze". It's an appropriate way to consider her body of work. And what a piece of work. Though she frowns on questions of surgery (figuratively, of course), Cher now resembles a monument to herself: timeless, ageless, expressionless.
But what she lacks in range she more than makes up in attitude. Wise-ass remarks (she is effortlessly, even endearingly, foul-mouthed), costumes that hand your imagination its P45, an ever-rotating range of wigs and, occasionally, her music, best convey her personality.
Opening with a strutting version of U2's I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For, but consigning I've Got You Babe to a video clip, the set feels topsy-turvy though; more Bono than Sonny.
Throughout, in fact, the sixties and seventies are dispensed with in faux flower power outfits and mechanical medleys, while her Dusty Springfieldesque power ballads take centre stage, surging with big-hair displays, acrobatic dance routines and priapic guitar solos.
The highlights are slick; a histrionic Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down) a rollicking Gypsies, Tramps and Thieves, and - to boost the camp factor - a gloriously recreated If I Could Turn Back Time.
But for a dutifully listless encore of 90s club-anthem Believe, and a timely Britney jibe ("At least I sing live") diffused by the presence of a teleprompter, you couldn't fault the eloquence of her departure: Follow that, bitches. - Peter Crawley
Rogé, RTÉ NSO/Markson, NCH, Dublin
Reinhard Febel - Sphinxes.
Mozart - Piano Concerto in F K459. Schumann - Symphony No 2.
RTÉ commissioned two new works for the Schumannfest by the RTÉ NSO under Gerhard Markson. For the opening programme of the series Seóirse Bodley ciphered letters from Schumann's name into his Metamorphoses on the Name Schumann.
For the second, last Friday, the German composer Reinhard Febel's Sphinxes engaged more directly with Schumann's music and life. On the one hand, Febel makes quotations from Schumann's music, on the other he attempts to deal with what he calls the tragic aspect of the composer's life, "his personality falling apart; the loss of control; the jump into the river Rhine; then the quiet ending, looking back to the beginning".
Febel treats the orchestra in an intentionally blurred and disorienting way, with ideas, as it were (some of them Schumann's) emerging out of haze. The fragmentation is oddly threatening and even the most distinct of musical material is denied clarity. Markson's performance had moments in which things sounded unnecessarily tentative, particularly in passages of spaced-out dissolution. But the almost unrelieved bleakness that Febel seems to have in mind was well communicated.
Although Schumann was in buoyant spirits when he sketched his Second Symphony in December 1845, he seems to have struggled to complete it. He later wrote of having been "half sick" and of how the work reminded him "of a dark time" - in May 1846 he had complained of "a constant singing and roaring in the ears".
The affirmativeness of most of the music does, however, seem to contradict the idea of interpreting this a as a dark symphony. And Gerhard Markson's handling of the three fast movements was as affirmative as you could wish. The direct thrust of his manner carried the music with persuasive sweep, and he was also sensitive in his response to the songful melancholy of the slow movement.
Pascal Rogé was the soloist in Mozart's Piano Concerto in F, K459. His playing was beautifully turned, graceful, and pianistically impeccable, but altogether too bland. He was not helped by the fact that the orchestral accompaniment tended to be overweight and opaque in relation to the lightness of his playing. The RTÉ NSO's Schumannfest continues in Limerick next Thursday, and Dublin on Friday. - Michael Dervan
Fibonacci Sequence, Elmwood Hall, Belfast
Mozart - Flute Quartet in D. Oboe Quartet.
Ginastera - Duo for flute and oboe, Impresiones de la Puna.
Copland - Two Threnodies.
David Matthews - The Flaying of Marsyas.
Listening to these warm and natural performances of Mozart's early quartets for wind instruments and strings I was struck again by how well it all sounds, the way comparatively simple looking intervals come to life in performance.
Copland also manages to charm a somewhat wan expression out of flute (Ileana Ruhemann) and string trio in his In Memoriam Igor Stravinsky (the companion piece in memory of Beatrice Cunningham gets bogged down in rather square phrasing) and the pieces by the Argentinian Ginastera appeal, the melancholy Impresiones de la Puna for flute and string quartet conveying more depth of feeling than the lively Duo.
Inspired by a Titian painting of the classical story by Ovid, David Matthews's The Flaying of Marsyas recreates the musical contest between Marsyas and Apollo which ends in Marsyas being skinned alive. There were virtuoso performances from oboist Gareth Hulse (Marsyas) and violinist Jack Liebeck (Apollo). But while Titian's great painting conveys his feelings about this horrible story, Matthews's piece settles for description. The story was nevertheless vividly enough represented and as a musical narrative it hardly needed the detailed introduction provided, in person, by the composer.
The other instruments - Ursula Gough, violin, Yuko Innoue, viola and Andrew Fuller, cello - provided strong contributions throughout this well-contrasted programme. - Dermot Gault
