Reviewed today are the West Cork Chamber Music Festival, Metallica in the RDS Arena in Dublin and RTÉ NSO/Altschuler playing Dvorak and Mozart in the National Concert Hall in Dublin
West Cork Chamber Music Festival Cork
György Ligeti - Six Bagatelles
Peteris Vasks - String Quartet No 4.
Dvorák - String Quartet in G Op 106.
The West Cork Chamber Music Festival opened on Saturday with a programme of works from the new European Union members-states.
Although this may sound exotic, in reality, especially in terms of this particular festival, it was anything but.
Ligeti's early Bagatelles have featured more than once in festival programmes. Latvian composer Peteris Vasks has been the focus of special attention in Bantry, and was present in person in 2001 for a newly commissioned work, when he also took part in master classes and a public interview. And Dvorák's late String Quartet in G was featured in an RTÉ Vanbrugh Quartet national tour earlier this year.
The British wind quintet, the Galliard Ensemble, who worked on the Ligeti Bagatelles with the composer, gave an energetically driven account of these wryly witty pieces which the composer allowed for many years to lie in his drawer. They were written in 1953, but not heard in public until 1969, after which they rapidly won the affection of performers and public alike.
The Galliard's robust playing style tended to emphasise aspects of the music's construction that highlighted its affinity with Ligeti's later music.
Peteris Vasks is a composer whose music is strongly elegiac. He worries about being "balanced on the edge of time's end", and out of his worries he wants to offer a message of hope. The three sombre movements of his Fourth Quartet of 1999 (Elegy, Chorale and Meditation) are separated by two Toccatas, ironic, "in a spirit close to that of Shostakovich's style", close enough, in fact, to prompt suggestions of pastiche.
Like a number of Vasks's other works, the Fourth Quartet sounds on a first hearing like a piece in which the intensity of expressive purpose has been allowed to take precedence over the quality of the material and its working out.
It's not that the music lacks affecting moments, simply that the composer stretches them out for rather longer than he seems able to persuade one that they are worth. The Vilnius Quartet played the work with focused reserve.
I'm not sure it was a wise move to follow the Vasks with Dvorák's Quartet in G, Op. 106, a dangerously diffuse work, and the least successful of the composer's late quartets.
The performance by the RTÉ Vanbrugh Quartet tended to live in the moment in a way that made the piece seem rather too long. The special treatment that's needed to make this particular work sound persuasive was not forthcoming on this occasion.
Michael Dervan
Metallica
RDS arena, Dub;in
It was full metal racket at the RDS last Friday, the day when the sun shone and all the mini-me Metallica fans finished school early so that they could, under the watchful eye of guardians, come out to play.
Fact: metal music is now cross generational. You could see parents old enough to have riffed on Metallica from Kill 'Em All, the band's 1983 debut album; and you could see their offspring, drowning in XL Metallica T-shirts, who have been into the band only from last year's St. Anger.
That Metallica have managed to bring along both sets of fans with them in their almost 25- year career is not just canny - it's also a measure of the quality and depth of their music.
Which isn't, frankly, something you can say about support act (and act really is the appropriate word) Slipknot. While the US band was well received by the majority of the capacity crowd, there's something about them that reeks of corporate marketing meetings and business suits.
Despite their selection of slasher-movie masks, their boilers suits, their guttural vocals and their one-note pile-driving music, the band come across as conniving musical rapists. The violent tone and the beery Fight Club nihilism, meanwhile - which never really took off, not even in the pit in front of the stage - highlighted the worst excesses of (mostly) lonely males who have watched one pseudo snuff movie too many.
Metallica are above such nonsense, thankfully, which is why their appeal is widespread. From start to finish their gig was a statement of intent: layered slabs of intricate and simplistic hard rock delivered with a mixture of muscle, melody and a minimum of fuss.
Think metal and you automatically have images of relentless guitar riffs churned out by meatheads; think Metallica and you have swirling guitar lines and hefty, occasionally anthemic, choruses that fit neatly into the mind.
Incredibly, the music isn't streamlined; rather it's a mothership that hosts a blend of traditional rock dynamics and metal genre staples that fuse into one large mound of mood and tempo.
They finished with a faithful version of Whiskey In The Jar and their own Seek and Destroy, ending the gig with the same sense of resilience and smarts that it began with.
Tony Clayton-Lea
RTÉ NSO/Altschuler
NCH, Dublin
Dvorák - Serenade for Strings.
Mozart - Sinfonia Concertante in E flat K297b.
Dvorák - Symphony No 5.
Mozart scholars remain at odds over the authorship of the E flat Sinfonia Concertante designated K. 297b.
This is not the one for violin and viola, also in E flat, but rather a work from the same mould only with four soloists instead of two. What's at issue is whether or not this is a piece that Mozart composed for flute, oboe, bassoon and horn in 1778. No autograph survives.
In the earliest available score, written in a copyist's hand, oboe and clarinet have replaced the flute and oboe respectively. Robert Levin argues that the work cannot be by Mozart; Friedrich Blume that it couldn't be by anyone else.
This academic stand-off made it hard not to be vigilant for either Mozartian fingerprints or traces of another voice during Friday night's performance by the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra under Vladimir Altschuler.
A strong argument for the Mozart case is the beautifully intuitive combining and recombining of the solo wind lines, played with flair and sensitivity by the four NSO principals, Matthew Manning (oboe), John Finucane (clarinet), Michael Jones (bassoon) and Leslie Bishop (horn).
On the other hand, one or two orchestral passages - notably pedal-points - sounded repetitive, and had a rather non-Mozartian stasis about them. This may well have had more to do with the performance than the score. Altschuler, who did not have the best of nights, was unable to match in the orchestral music the energy displayed by the soloists.
It was the same in the opening work, Dvorák's Serenade for Strings, in which the conductor could elicit no more than a workaday account bereft of magic and with persistent lapses of solidarity among the violins.
He had more success with the broader palette of Dvorák's Symphony No 5, although even here there were missed opportunities for intensity that left the excitement of the conclusion feeling a little shallow.
The Minister for the Marine, Mr Ahern, has approved funding of €30,000 for five community inshore rescue services (CIRSs) run by voluntary crews for the Irish Coast Guard.
Grants of €6,000 each will assist CIRS units at Tramore, Co Waterford; Bantry, Co Cork; Derrynane; Bonmahon and Ballybunion, Co Kerry.
The Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI) says there are around seven lifeboat call-outs every week to people kitesurfing, windsurfing and surf kayaking. Last year, some 364 launches were made to participants in "extreme" watersports.
It has just produced an interactive DVD with safety information for "extreme" watersport enthusiasts. It advises on careful planning, safety equipment, correct rigging, recognising limits and recovery techniques, and includes tips from experts.
- The DVD is available free of charge from the RNLI at 1800 789589.
Michael Dungan
