Irish Times writers give their verdict.
You Can't Deep Freeze A Red Hot Mama
Pavilion, Dún Laoghaire
By Gerry Colgan
There must have been something special about Sophie Tucker that enabled her to reign for 60 years (1906-66) as queen of her own brand of showbiz. This tribute to her by Susie Kennedy is a chronological reprise of songs that made her famous, from her beginnings in virtual cellars to stages such as the Ziegfeld Follies', when variety was king. They are a toe-tapping selection.
Our hostess lacks the reputed bulk of her subject, who was, it seems, a very large lady. But Kennedy is what the captain in HMS Pinafore would describe as a pleasantly plump person, and she shakes it all about with enough abandon to create an illusion of bulk.
This, with lungs conditioned to belting out the numbers and a broad white smile, establishes a likable presence of some authority.
So we kick off with the title number, closely followed by the immortal One Of These Days, which also closes the show. Then we are into a series of songs such as Follow A Star and Nobody Loves A Fat Girl, for which the verse is often included, adding dramatic depth. A small medley with Broken Hearted Clown, sweet and sad, followed by the rhythmic Oh You Have No Idea is a gem.
And nostalgia is catered for with The Dark Town Strutters Ball and Alexander's Ragtime Band.
The second half jumps into standards such as Hard Hearted Hannah, Stormy Weather and The Lady Is A Tramp, consolidating the mood already established. Then there are fun numbers such as I'm Living Alone And I Like It, Mr Fink and You've Got To Be Loved To Be Healthy. By the end we have been treated to a generous helping of
Sophie Tucker in her many manifestations. A fine jazz ensemble lifts and sustains it all, with Cian Boylan on piano, Rock Fox on sax, Ciaran Wilde on clarinet, Guy Rickarby on drums and Damian Evans on base. Together with their chanteuse they are a winning team.
Wihan Quartet,
NTL Studio, Belfast
By Dermot Gault
Dvorak - Quartet in E flat Op 51. Mozart - Quartet in D minor K421
Is there a great composer whose chamber music is as neglected as Dvorák's? The American is the only one of his 16 quartets that is at all well known, but this E flat Quartet from 1879 is as attractive as anything he wrote.
Given the long and distinguished history of Czech quartet performance, a great weight of expectation lies on any Czech quartet, especially when playing Czech music. The Wihan Quartet have been playing together since 1985 and are obviously a fine group. The tone is grainy, but with a silky finish. Although pianos and pianissimos can be a bit healthy sounding, their careful weighting of tone allowed the emotional nuances of detail of the Mozart D minor Quartet to emerge. The andante was paced skilfully, the players giving the music space while keeping it moving.
But of course it was the Dvorák that called for the group's special qualities. There were times in the first movement when one could have wanted more sweetness of tone, and in the second movement more could have been made of the dynamic contrasts written into the exchanges between the first violin and the viola (and, later, the second violin), but the third movement Romanze had feeling and the dance-like finale was both spirited and earthy.
We had an encore, none other than the finale of the American quartet. Here the playing was at its most flexible and spontaneous, combining vitality with the sort of smooth integration of detail
that only the most practised quartets achieve.
David Adams (organ)
St Michael's, Dún Laoghaire
By Michael Dervan
David Adams is what you would have to call an unassuming virtuoso. He takes the heaviest of technical demands in his stride, without ever playing to the gallery in search of acknowledgment.
If he were a chef you would find yourself marvelling at the respect with which he handles his ingredients, maintaining their integrity, highlighting their individuality, making something special even out of humble raw material that other hands might pass by.
His recital at St Michael's in Dún Laoghaire on Sunday (the last of the current series there) juxtaposed Bach's great Prelude and Fugue in E flat (the St Anne) with the Czech composer Milos Sokola's 1966 Passacaglia Quasi Toccata on the name Bach, a piece written almost as one long flourish, and Brahms's introverted chorale prelude Herzlich Tut Mich Verlangen, Op 122 No 10, a piece that at one and the same time harks back to the contrapuntal practices of the past and anticipates some of the effects that have become commonplace in minimalism.
Liszt's Les Morts (also known as Trauerode) combines grand romantic rhetoric with the more inward, harmonically prophetic urgings that have made late Liszt an area into which all too few performers dare to venture.
Adams followed this with the florid Rhapsody, Op 65 No. 1, from that part of Max Reger's output that could almost be viewed as an early 20th-century precursor of the compositional concerns that came to be branded "new complexity". And he also offered a sombre setting by Reger of the chorale already heard in the treatment by Brahms.
Adams likes to find room in his programmes for the totally unexpected. On this occasion it was a high-spirited piece by the little-known Antalffy-Zsiross, a Reger pupil who died in New York in 1945. Sportive Fauns, inspired by the Swiss symbolist painter Arnold Böcklin, had more than a tinge of the fairground in its sometimes wild exuberance.
