Never underestimate the power of pop. Nobody could marshal Oxegen's 60,000 heavy breathers to a single stage, so the disintegration of Saturday's main stage audience had a near Yeatsian inevitability - things fall apart; the centre cannot hold, write Peter Crawley.
Oxegen, Punchestown, Kildare
Stunning, then, that Sunday's largest crowd was amassed not for bright young things Keane, or critical darlings Wilco, nor even for headliners-by-default The Darkness. Nope, instead it was a 2 p.m. love-in for Black Eyed Peas.
Now the Peas aren't half bad, a saccharine version of LA hip-hop with calorific beats and breakdancing. Actually, they're about 75 per cent good, and on Sunday that was good enough. MCs Will.I.Am and Apl de Ap supplied most of the pyrotechnics, but it was the pneumatically gyrating form of Fergie that entranced the concert cameras as Hey Mama, Shut Up and, of course, Where is the Love? flickered across the big screens.
Although Addicted and Sometimes, the glassy and propulsive singles of Dublin's excellent Alphastates, were bootylicious in their own right, neither they nor the ricocheting beats of Scouse indie hopes The Zutons could stem the tide of slicker pop.
"I'm bummed it's not still raining," said genre-straddling pop dynamo Pink. "I wanted to get muddy and dirty and sexy."
Three songs later - Don't Let Me Get Me, Trouble and God is a DJ - Pink got her wish, dashing out into the shower, mouth wide open for the drops, then thrashing around in a puddle for Just Like a Pill; a winning solidarity with the sodden.
At last! Oxegen finally located a political conscience that didn't involve presidential name-calling or liberal lip service. In the right-on tones of Michael Franti, back from a recent visit to Iraq, the refrain "we can bomb the world to pieces, but we can't bomb it into peace" rode a shuffling groove into a euphoric release of human hope. Which, as Faithless proved, is easily crushed.
From the main stage the post-house bores cast the second vote that God is a DJ. (Oh Lord, if thou art taking requests, please lift thy mighty needle from this tedium.) The rain was biblical, beating down on the Green Room tent like it had something to prove. Kiwi sylph Bic Runga soothed our troubled souls beneath its shelter, before alt.country noiseniks Wilco arrived to rough it up again.
In stimulating juxtaposition, Wu Tang Clan, the pugilistic hip-hop conglomerate, delivered machine-gun bursts of rhyme from the Ticket stage, while Dublin's The Republic of Loose, arch-copyists of black music, bounced to Tell More Lies from a very safe distance.
Finally, a long-delayed Muse took the main stage and filled the ether with melodrama. True, Matt Bellamy's keyboard, a faux-futuristic metallic thing apparently salvaged from the Tardis, was a bit much - nay, a lot much. But Oxegen badly needs that ridiculous amperage and hence the hold-tight histrionics of Hysteria and New Born, the rib-cracking overdrive of Plug in Baby and Stockholm Syndrome. It was the end of the world as Muse knows it, and that felt fine.
Just as overblown, The Darkness did the same thing behind a knowing wink. Distracting us from David Bowie's sad absence with belching smoke pots and copious scissor kicks, the spandex-stretching, ostrich-stepping Justin Hawkins wished Bowie a speedy recovery from emergency heart surgery, then blasted off with the defibrillating crunch of Growing On Me and Get Your Hands Off My Woman. New song Hazel Eyes "may be a B-side", the toothily eccentric Hawkins told us, his tresses tumbling over a silver visor. "Or, just maybe, it will be a worldwide smash!" Gloriously entertaining, you betcha, but during a set padded out with B-sides, one wondered if the meteoric rise of Lowestoft's thumb-raisers may soon flame out. For now though, when the personal ad of popular taste simply demands a GSOH, The Darkness are the right band at the right time. Same time next year then?
Rural Electric, Parochial Hall, Dungloe
Be-Bop-A-Lula, she's my baby, Be-Bop-A-Lula, I don't mean maybe" - it's the late 1950s and strange times in Meenamore. The ESB men have arrived, advance guard of a new civilisation, among them guitar-toting Gene Vincent fan George "Moody" McLaughlin.
Little John Nee has become a philosopher of the townland, and Rural Electric follows his biggest success, The Derry Boat, as an exploration of the lives and loves of old Donegal.
Once again this one-man show explores a rural community in transition, not to Scotland this time, but to a different and strange future. Little John is a quick-change artist: now a local priest with dark secrets and a fear of the "bright lights of Creeslough"; now Biddy Byrne, queen of Meenamore, where even the wings of the butterflies beat out her name.
He can play it for laughs, and there are some good ones in Rural Electric, but the one-act play also hints at the impact of the magical and mystical "electric" on many levels - the break with rhythms of nature, the acceleration of change, the loss of old ways.
One old woman with the gift sees it all - the coming prosperity, the end of emigration, the cappuccino-makers and other things she can't name, and also the road deaths, suicides and the young girls puking in the streets. She chooses only to tell curious locals "you'll get married, and have two children". Little John's Meenamore is a townland in the half-light, its own soap opera of secrets, sex and violence, a close-knit community where truth is, maybe by necessity, of the varnished variety.
What meaning attaches to its "progress" into the full glare of post-electric modernity? For Little John, the key continues to lie in relationships, those positives and negatives whose charges really make the world go round.
Rural Electric, commissioned by the Earagail Arts Festival and premiered in the authentic surroundings of Dungloe Parochial Hall, is still a work in progress. The poles are up, the wires are on, but Moody McLaughlin and friends still have a bit more to do.
There's already plenty to admire on the way to a glorious finale with its Wild West-style "shoot-out", the men in black getting their comeuppance - including the 15 Gallagher brothers - and Moody getting the girl.
As they say in Donegal, he's a good man for one man. - Martin McGinley
Rural Electric continues on tour in Co Donegal as part of the Earagail Arts Festival until July 17th.
Thomas Trotter (organ), St Michael's, Dún Laoghaire
Bach - Prelude and Fugue in D, BWV532. Lionel Rogg - Partita on Nun freut Euch. Schumann - Studies in E, A flat and B minor. Arvo Pärt - Annum per annum. Ad Wammes - Miroir. Liszt - Fantasia and Fugue on BACH.
Thomas Trotter's organ recital at St Michael's presented its six works in pairs, juxtaposing great masters of the 18th and 19th centuries (Bach, Schumann and Liszt) with figures from the 20th century (the Swiss, Lionel Rogg, still better known as a performer than as a composer, Estonian Arvo Pärt, and Dutchman Ad Wammes).
Trotter is one of those organists who reaches out to his listeners. St Michael's doesn't provide programme notes, so he offered spoken introductions to most of the pieces. And, more importantly, his playing was expressively alert, clear in articulation, and well-sprung in rhythm.
The programme's 20th-century pieces were, by intention, not particularly challenging for the listener. Rogg's Partita on Nun freut Euch expresses its neo-classical concerns in neo-Hindemithian mode. Pärt's Annum per Annum celebrates the quotidian nature of the Mass through five colourings of the same material framed by pulsing chords. And Wammes's Miroir takes minimalist concerns into the realm of silly prettiness. Only the Pärt seemed at all short-changed in performance, sounding a little too hasty in its unfolding.
Schumann's Studies, Opus 56, were written for a piano with an organ-like pedalboard, but are nowadays usually heard on the organ, or, more occasionally, in Debussy's arrangement for two pianos. Trotter was eloquent in the studies in E and A flat, but, no more than most organists, seemed unable to resist making the Study in B minor sound like fairground music.
The performance of Liszt's Fantasia and Fugue on BACH was delivered with free and ardent rhetoric. But the strongest musical impression of the evening actually came at the start, in Bach's Prelude and Fugue in D, lucid, nicely aerated, at all times potent. - Michael Dervan
Anne Page continues the organ series at St Michael's next Sunday (details: 01-878 6926)
Breslin, NYOI Under-18s/Grant, NCH, Dublin
Tchaikovsky - Romeo and Juliet. Rachmaninov - Paganini Rhapsody. Shostakovich - Symphony No 10.
Gearóid Grant, founding conductor of the National Youth Orchestra of Ireland (NYOI) Under-18s, celebrated his 25th season with a four-venue Irish tour that concluded at the National Concert Hall on Sunday night.
His all-Russian programme drew an interesting range of responses from his young players, aged 13 to 18 years. They opened with the dramatic portrait-painting of Tchaikovsky's Romeo and Juliet Fantasy Overture. Shakespeare's brooding ecclesiastical backdrop and the vicious antagonism between the two warring families were vividly characterised in playing that was only occasionally disrupted by lapses within one section or another.
What, surprisingly, proved less successful was the piece's famous love music. It came across as reserved, almost aloof, for which normally the conductor would have to accept responsibility. On this occasion, however, it was hard not to wonder if this coolness had more to do with the age of the players, many of them old enough to relate to the play's central pairing, but maybe not yet old enough to feel at ease giving public expression to something as private - and perhaps new - as love. Codswallop perhaps, but it sounded a bit like that.
In contrast, this expressive reticence did not extend to the more intellectual orientation of Shostakovich's Symphony No. 10, composed following the death of Stalin in 1953. If the orchestra accepted Solomon Volkov's assertion that this music is "about Stalin and the Stalin years", it certainly showed in the grim darkness they achieved in the first movement and in the savage vitality of the second, where it was easy to believe this was a caustic portrait of the dictator.
Derry-born Cathal Breslin was the soloist in Rachmaninov's Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, playing with assurance and sparkle in all but the most unforgivingly virtuosic of the work's 24 variations. Grant and the NYOI Under-18s provided solid and enthusiastic accompaniment. - Michael Dungan
