Classical music - including an all-English prgramme - and theatre in today's reviews.
Callino String Quartet
Kilkenny Arts Festival
One of the most refreshing aspects of the Callino String Quartet when they first appeared in public could, paradoxically, be described as their lack of professionalism. The professionalism I have in mind is the sort of thing Mahler was referring to when he made his famous remark equating tradition with slovenliness. The received wisdom that dictates how things are to be done needs ongoing reappraisal. And the Callino's first concert (before they even had a name as a group) found them making music with a simplicity and directness that shed years of the accretions regarded as best practice.
They've since undergone one of the major traumas that face any chamber ensemble, a change of member , with Rebecca Jones replacing Samantha Hutchins (née Miller) on viola. On the evidence of the group's concerts at Kilkenny Arts Festival, Jones is a slightly more assertive player than I remember Hutchins to be, but the individual, fresh appeal of the playing style remains.
Take their approach to the opening movement of Mozart's Quartet in D minor, K421, at St Canice's Cathedral on Tuesday night. The tempo they set was on the leisurely side. It was as if the players were encountering the music for the first time and, still newly in love with it, wanted to allow ample time for every special moment to register. It's a difficult movement to pace satisfactorily, and the Callino's approach inverted the effect of speedier playing, occasionally falling short on momentum, while glorying in the detail and successfully communicating a strong sense of affection.
Bartók's Third Quartet of 1927 is the shortest and most condensed of the composer's six string quartets, a piece from a decade that was as remarkable in quartet writing as it was in most areas of musical endeavour. The Callinos gave the impression of playing the music straight while welcoming the opportunities it affords to present a compendium of intricately worked string-quartet colourings.
Outside of the Mozart and Bartók, the Callino's performances in Kilkenny were collaborations: Arensky's Quartet in A minor for violin, viola and two cellos on Tuesday (for which Robin Michael joined the line-up and Ioana Petcu-Colan yielded the leader's chair to Sarah Sexton) and Dvorák's Quintet in G, Op 77, and Nocturne, Op 40, both with double-bassist Malachy Robinson at a recital in St John's church, on John Street.
St John's is a small venue into which Robinson, perhaps used to working as a one-man bass section in the Irish Chamber Orchestra, projected a tone strong enough to unbalance the ensemble. In a concert where the bass lines tended to stand apart from rather than blend in with the other four instruments, even the opening line of the Nocturne was made to sound like a double- bass solo with cello support.
The Arensky quartet, distinctively Russian in tone, and original home of Arensky's best-known work (it's the source of the Variations On A Theme Of Tchaikovsky for string orchestra), was altogether more finely integrated. The spirit of this unusual work was captured with genial warmth.
Festival continues until Sunday
Michael Dervan
Mrs Warren's Profession
Cork Opera House
A play overwhelmed by its own arguments seems to best way to describe this Yew Tree and Cork Opera House production. Mrs Warren, ainternational businesswoman whose ill-gotten wealth has educated her daughter to the highest standard, hopes to enjoy the future she has anticipated with this now adult but critical child. First performed in 1902, the play challenged with George Bernard Shaw's typical ruthlessness society's standards of behaviour so long as appearances are maintained.
By transposing the plot to the 1950s, John Breen's direction loses the formality of those appearances and therefore weakens the discussions that, in typical Shaw style, take the place of action. The conversational conflict prompted by Mrs Warren's defence of her success, as a brothel keeper, in helping unsupported women depends on timing, as do the aphorisms that leaven the polemic. There are many reflective pauses when the flourish of a gown or a fan might have weighted the space.
Although well supported by Sinead O'Hanlon's set, Breen's updating raises more doubts about the play than it deserves: by the 1950s a long-lasting European business career must have run across a world war at some time, and coexisting with Hitler in Vienna would make Kitty Warren a different kind of heroine altogether. Yet Breen's notion of a relatively contemporary context is not completely wrong: even today the reminder that it's only good manners to be ashamed has significance, although beyond what Shaw might have intended.
There is a sense too that, while everyone works hard in their roles, and nobody harder than Charlotte Bradley as Mrs Warren, the cast is not really comfortable; the only member with any sense of ownership is Robert O'Mahony as Crofts, a character more easily transferred to the chosen decade than any of the others. O'Mahony's appetite for his role is almost Edwardian, but it is also unmatched, and the presiding caution flattens even the final curtain.
Runs until Saturday
Mary Leland
Whelan, RTÉ Concert Orchestra/Armstrong
NCH, Dublin
Coates - Merrymakers overture. Elgar - Salut d'Amour. Delius - Summer Evening. Head - A Green Cornfield; Sweet chance, that led my steps abroad. Arnold - Cornish Dances. Vaughan Williams - Silent noon; Let Beauty Awake; Fantasia on Greensleeves. Coates - Knightsbridge March
All the music in this lunchtime concert was of the lighter kind. The music and the manner of performance showed that being light - or should I say popular? - does not necessarily mean being lightweight.
The conductor was Mark Armstrong, whose handling of this all-English programme showed a subtle yet firm grip on how to get the best from music that, even if its aim is neither high nor low, is aimed precisely. The RTÉ Concert Orchestra responded suitably to his precise shaping and timing via well-scaled expression that never strove too much.
The music of Eric Coates is lightweight, for example, and designed as such. Its high-art vocabulary can easily make it sound pretentious, however, unless it is played straight and clean, as on this occasion. Malcolm Arnold's Four Cornish Dances are more substantial, though good fun, and here again a straightforward performance was a winner, full of character.
Franzita Whelan, who sang two songs by the singer and composer Michael Head, judged things impeccably, with clarity of words and expression that was ideal in restraint and precision. In two early songs by Vaughan Williams, including the evergreen Silent Noon, she likewise made just the right impact, showing how refined this simple music is.
That was also true of the performances of the three most important orchestral works on the programme, Delius's Summer Evening, Vaughan Williams's Fantasia on Greensleeves and Elgar's Salut d'Amour. The last two in particular are models of how to create beauty from the lightest of ideas.
Martin Adams
