Irish Times critics review the RTÉ Vanbrugh String Quartet at the NCH, Dublin, Tom Climent and Sarah Walker at the Fenton Gallery, Cork, Flight at Henry Place, Dublin, and Knox, Concorde/O'Leary at the National Gallery, Dublin
RTÉ Vanbrugh String Quartet
NCH John Field Room
Haydn - Quartet in E flat, Opus 76 No 6. Ian Wilson - Lyric Suite. Dvorák - Quartet in D minor, Opus 34
The RTÉ Vanbrugh Quartet's first tour of the new season, which began in Ring, Co Waterford on Friday, and reached the NCH John Field Room on Sunday afternoon, brought with it a new work commissioned by RTÉ from Ian Wilson. Wilson is the Irish composer who in recent years has been most preoccupied with the writing of string quartets, and his new Lyric Suite is actually his seventh for the medium.
The work is subtitled "Seven elegiac pieces for string quartet" and the composer's brief programme note also invokes the association of songs without words.
The elegiac character is generally mild rather than dark, and there are moments in the music which evoke the kind of melancholy familiar from the string quartets of the late Brian Boydell.
Wilson has been careful to give gratifying solos to each of the instruments, and he plays skilfully with the wide textural possibilities of the quartet medium. The players gave the impression of being fully inside the music and were only momentarily stretched by some of the most stratospheric writing. It's easy to imagine the Vanbrughs wanting to programme this work a lot.
In the last quartet from Haydn's Opus 76 set they sounded more comfortable and relaxed with this composer than I can recall hearing them in the past. In particular, the quieter and more relaxed manner of the leader, Gregory Ellis, set a tone that was at once intimate and revealing, and the other players responded in kind.
Dvorák's Quartet in D minor, Opus 34, is one of those works which has been unfairly given a back seat in relation to the composer's most frequently heard quartet, the American. In a reversal of what might have been expected on past form, the Vanbrugh's performance didn't achieve quite the same degree of internal illumination as the Haydn.
Michael Dervan
Tom Climent and Sarah Walker
Fenton Gallery, Cork
Tom Climent has changed direction for this exhibition, moving away from his impressive reworkings of Grand Master paintings to an immediate response to the Spanish landscape. As a consequence, his palette has heated up and his approach to the generation of original compositions has also grown in kind.
Within these paintings we see discrete references to land and sky, as well as a faint, inconclusive suggestion of architectural details.
The impact of direct observation might then appear merely academic, as the paintings are essentially abstract.
Surface is of prime importance, with Climent demonstrating his own masterly use of paint, as thin washes compete with progressively bold flourishes of the brush. The energy therein finds companionship with the strong tonal contrasts, which lend a turbulent quality suggestive of transition or distorted perception.
This dialogue between space and surface is also a feature of Sarah Walker's paintings - in particular the wonderfully composed series of works based on the cliffs of Downpatrick Head.
The emphasis on the structure of these cliffs is explored with composure as a sequence of paintings begins with small-scale sketches and leads on to work in excess of two metres wide. The shape of the cliffs, with their distinctive chasm, is counterpoised against a flat featureless sky. This creates a stark, dramatic motif which is arranged in a number of different ways, so that it either dominates the composition, is tucked away in a corner or fills the entire surface in a stylised representation of textural surface.
In the vault space of the gallery, be sure to check out the video projection installation by Lorraine Neeson. The deceptive simplicity yet undeniable eloquence of her work is marking out this young artist as a real emerging talent.
Runs until October 9th
Mark Ewart
Flight
THEatre SPACE@Henry Place, Dublin
This new play by Seamas Keenan, who won the Hennessy Literary Award 2004, was commissioned by Derry's Playhouse Theatre, where it premiered recently. It is a compelling piece that marries heroic myth to the savagery of guerrilla warfare in Northern Ireland, to uncertain but intriguing effect.
The great aviatrix, Amelia Earhart, disappeared with her co-pilot, Fred Noonan, in 1937, and their bodies were never found. In this play they are still alive, having deliberately staged their disappearance to live anonymously in Derry. Earhart's reason for doing this is that she was disillusioned with fame, saw flying as the engine of inevitable war, and opted out.
Many years later, Earhart and Noonan come across three republicans about to kill a young boy for the kind of offences associated with punishment beatings. They are taken captive, and the callousness of the trio is pitted against the concerns of the two Americans, now on the brink of old age. Some telling dialogue follows, and a cynical disregard for life is pitted against physical and moral courage.
The characters are drawn with conviction by a writer whose dialogue ranges from the lyrical to the patois of the brutalised, always with a finger on the pulse of living speech. Keenan's republicans are all too credible, unable to adjust to the loss of power that has accompanied their very success in achieving civil rights.
The Americans, too, are imagined in some depth. Earhart has the words and persona to project the aura of her former greatness, and of the idealism that prompted her to abandon the world of fame for what, in the view seen from the air, had appeared to promise an idyllic haven for her and her partner.
The play has flaws, not quite extracting full value from the imaginative clash of ideologies it sets up. Earhart and Noonan are young, belying the references to their age - but the performances of Catherine Farrell and Matt Jennings amply compensate for that. Gerry Doherty, Seamus Ball and Paul Kennedy are nastily persuasive as the gunmen, and director Lisa May conducts with sensitivity.
Gerry Colgan
Knox, Concorde/O'Leary
National Gallery, Dublin
Ed Bennett - Excavation. Garth Knox - La Valse de la vineuse. Jane O'Leary - why the hill sings. Salvatore Sciarrino - Tre notturni brillanti. Alejandro Castaños - Riflesso
Garth Knox, former viola player with the Arditti String Quartet and the Ensemble InterContemporain, was the special guest of contemporary music ensemble Concorde in Sunday's concert featuring music for viola and viola d'amore.
Just one piece in the five-work programme was not a world première. Sicilian composer Salvatore Sciarrino wrote his Tre notturni brillanti for solo viola in 1974. Knox demonstrated an extraordinary virtuosity with high-speed bowing and flighty harmonics in a delicate perpetuum mobile like muted hummingbird wings, upon which all manner of whistles, twitters and squawks intruded.
In Knox's own La Valse de la vineuse, the viola d'amore "dances" with other instruments in turn. It was affectionately inspired by a bar in Burgundy and has a sort of ritornello featuring a jolly ostinato plucked on the cello. The clarinettist rhythmically shuffles his feet to evoke the dance of a drunken French farmer.
The special qualities of the 14-stringed viola d'amore were explored at some length in why the hill sings by Concorde's director, Jane O'Leary. Scored for piano and slightly amplified viola d'amore, the music is a response to the poem Viola d'Amore by Moya Cannon, who spoke before the performance. The piano notes - both played and plucked - resonated in eerie sympathy with those on the viola d'amore, evoking the subterranean caves and streams which Cannon poses as a metaphor for love.
Bangor's Ed Bennett notes an "ambiguity between abstraction and figuration" in the painting Excavation by Willem de Kooning. His meandering piece of the same name for viola and the full Concorde ensemble often resembles an anarchic conversation with everyone shouting their opinions at once.
The concert closed with Castaños's Riflesso, which places the viola d'amore in a Vivaldi-style concerto relationship with the ensemble. Atranquil start gives way to a rhythmically driven crescendo and a solo cadenza. It ends with noteless bowing and blowing like heavy breathing.
Michael Dungan
