Thursday's opening concert in the National Chamber Choir's summer series at the National Gallery featured the world première of Talking of Michelangelo by Italian composer Nicola Sani, who was born in 1961, writes Michael Dervan. Also reviewed - A Midsummer Night's Dream in Cork and Amy Winehouse at the Village, Dublin.
National Chamber Choir/Antunes
National Gallery, Dublin
It was the first of six joint commissions by the choir and the gallery, each concert based on a painting in the gallery's permanent collection.
The 10-minute piece, in which the singers are stretched out along the side aisles with the audience in between, is a wordless, expressionistic response to The Taking of Christ by Caravaggio (whose real name was Michelangelo Merisi). Sani achieves an intense evocation of the picture's stark contrast of darkness and light via 17 widely spaced solo lines, each holding long-sustained notes which here and there jump into brief, coloratura-style flourishes or slide up or down a few steps in short glissandos. While neither the technique nor spatial organisation is new, the effect was enthralling and the choir impressive in a piece as challenging for individual and collective musicianship as any I have ever heard it sing.
Programmes in the summer series also feature music from each of the EU's 10 new accession states. This time it was the turn of Poland and the Czech Republic, the former represented by the compact journey from poignant opening to harsh climax to quiet close in the Agnus Dei from Krzysztof Penderecki's 1981 Polish Requiem. The 1996 Rhythmus de gaudiis Paradisi, by Czech composer Petr Eben, celebrates the music of the heavens and is driven by a pressing current, bass pedals, and joyous declamations from the upper voices.
Both countries were also represented by earlier music - a William Byrd-like motet by the 16th-century Pole, Waclawz Szamotul, and two pieces by Jan Dismas Zelenka, a leading figure of the Czech baroque - alongside excerpts from Monteverdi's Missa a 4 voci da cappella. This concert therefore stretched from the Renaissance to the present day, with the choir, under its vivacious artistic director, Celso Antunes, giving compelling accounts in every style it encountered. - Michael Dungan
A Midsummer Night's Dream
MagicNet, Firkin Crane, Cork
Reduction of cast, plot and cohesion resulted in a presentation of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream in which the part was ruthlessly less than the whole. The extracted story of the young mortals deluded by a vengeful Puck into falling desperately in love with the wrong partners provided a vehicle for a display of energy, enthusiasm, originality and individual versatility - but a vehicle was what it remained, despite the quality of the performances and the constantly inventive approach of director Manuel Schobel.
Five separate companies were involved in the project and perhaps this was too much for such a narrow event. Opening in an Internet chatroom (at the "puckonline.net" website), from where the lovers sent their various messages, and with most of the action set in an airport baggage-reclaim hall, the piece, devised by Odette Bereska, was little more than a romp.
Shorn of the mighty framework of the original play, Puck himself, while given a dark and dangerous reading by Jesse Inman, hadn't much reason for even being around, and the proliferation of languages, although all the speaking in tongues was done with style, was alienating rather than unifying.
As part of the MagicNet programme in Cork, this presentation - worked between Carrousel Theater an der Parkaue (Germany), het MUZtheater (Netherlands), Teatret Vart (Norway), Teatro Guirigai (Spain) and Pilot Theatre Company (UK) - was a vigorous and rigorous adaptation aimed at attracting younger audiences. But younger audiences deserve the real thing and all of it. That's the challenge. - Mary Leland
Amy Winehouse
The Village, Dublin
Ah, Ms Winehouse, we've been expecting you.
Untainted by the smarm of the new jazz movement or the simper of her peers, the 20-year-old north London chanteuse is determined to have the last word. And, judging by her dependably razor-tongued form - blithely lacerating ex-boyfriends, Norah Jones, Katie Melua and Dido - that word will be unprintable.
There is still less doe-eyed sentimentality, or disingenuous coyness, in Winehouse's music, a sassy mix of purring jazz and growling hip-hop to match her earthy, booty-shaking sexuality. We are a little taken aback, nonetheless, to find the recent Ivor Novello Award winner on stage this muggy evening, tugging at her neckline and blowing down her dress.
Picking up where the venue's air-conditioning falls short, it's typical Winehouse: balancing moments of cool relief with music that's resolutely hot 'n' bothered.
Easing through Know You Now and Best Friend, her six-piece band deliver languorous brass, nimble guitar licks and a pouty bass throb, bringing a 1980s jazz-funk texture to Winehouse's début record, Frank.
When she wraps her fathomless tones around the corrosive lyrics of In My Bed, Take The Box or signature tune Stronger Than Me (all aimed at one hapless ex), it's far from easy listening.
Men, in Amy's view, need to separate sex from emotion, to understand that in the event of her infidelity they are solely responsible and if they are so effete as to "wanna talk it through" they will end up branded a "lady boy". Form an orderly queue, fellas.
Time being the enemy of youth and, sometimes, the uncouth, Winehouse's chutzpah may one day be quelled, her Vicky Pollardian spiel might even slow, but such vocal smoulder and lyrical wit rarely wanes. It may limit her chances of ever finding that perfect brute, but there are few in this game stronger than she. - Peter Crawley
