Irish Times writers review The Waterboys in Dublin's Olympia. La Vestale at the Wexford Festival Opera, Hanslip in the NCH and Raymond O'Donnell in Trinity College.
The Waterboys, Olympia, Dublin
"I sacrifice my power on the altar of your love," insists Mike Scott, delivering the three favourite themes of a frontman turned celebrant. Later, his acoustic set waits to see "the Christ in you", sonorously perceived within an audience that has become a congregation. Even before the Waterboy-in-chief reads the gospel, a kind of transubstantiation has occurred. This is no longer a gig. It's a Mass.
A man capable of singing about corn circles and finding God (in Glastonbury) on the same album, Scott's endless search for divinity and meaning has led the Scottish proponent of "big music" across the world and back through time. His spiritual passport now bears many stamps. "You are a delicate elephant with amnesia," he reads from a book of 14th century mysticism, "trying to live in an anthill." If the less delicate or elephantine among us can still follow Scott through such anthills of the spirit, it's partly because of his earthy tones, possibly because of his capacity for self-parody, largely because nobody takes him seriously, but mainly because he has perfect cheekbones and tousled hair the colour of midnight. Often, though, the music isn't big enough to look after itself.
Stripped of his famous kitchen sink arrangements (wisely, perhaps, The Whole of the Moon isn't played tonight), Scott's acoustic trio substitute mantra for bombast. This becomes a little wearying, as yet another song wallows for a while in the syrupy sadness of Richard Naiff's bright keyboard, occasionally elevated by Steve Wickham's electric fiddle, before Scott's pounding acoustic guitar grabs the tempo and hits the gas.
There are, of course, moments that make an over-generous ceremony worthwhile: Fisherman's Blues is pure hands-in-the-air, freak-out folk - still as bracing as the sea spray - and before a serene Peace of Iona, Scott kindly asks us to set our compasses "for the beyond". Aye-aye, Cap'n.
The Waterboys play tonight in The Royal Theatre, Castlebar, and tour from November 18th. - Peter Crawley
Hanslip, City of London Sinfonia/Hickox, NCH, Dublin
Stravinsky - Pulcinella Suite. Mendelssohn - Violin Concerto. Beethoven - Sympony No 3 (Eroica).
The 1920 ballet Pulcinella continued the successful collaboration between composer Stravinsky and impresario Diaghilev. The team - now joined by Picasso who did the designs - appeared on paper like a truly mighty confluence of leading-edge artistic modernity.
But Stravinsky, instead of continuing along the radical path signalled by The Rite of Spring seven years earlier, began to look backwards, assembling and discreetly altering music by Pergolesi and other composers of the Italian baroque for the adventures of Pulcinella, the country bumpkin figure of the old Italian commedia dell'arte.
On Thursday night, the ballet's light, bright scoring provided a perfect platform for the vivid playing of the City of London Sinfonia. Founding director Richard Hickox has a delicate touch well suited to the subtleties of Stravinsky's hand. The music - prevailingly warm and sprightly - remains very close to the baroque originals, but distilled with little changes of rhythmic emphasis or a single 20th-century note colouring an otherwise 18th-century chord. The effect was a dual listening experience akin to drinking hot chocolate with a shot of whiskey.
Hickox and the Sinfonia were similarly lean and lively in accompanying gifted soloist Chloe Hanslip in the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto. The teenager maintained a firm, glowing tone throughout the work's different moods, notably in her long high notes, which were exquisitely pure. The seeming effortlessness of her racing passage-work in the finale brought the concerto to an exciting finish.
The numerical balance between a smallish string complement and the wind and brass means that the City of London Sinfonia resembles the orchestra which gave the first performance of Beethoven's Eroica in 1805. With such forces Hickox could give greater significance to the wind and brass than a full-size orchestra normally allows. The result - the opposite of what Michael Steinberg calls a "monumental Eroica" - an energy that was electric bantamweight rather than bruising heavyweight. - Michael Dungan
Raymond O'Donnell, David Leigh (organ), Trinity College Chapel
The new series of Bach's complete organ works entered its second week with recitals on Tuesday and Thursday by organists from cathedrals in Galway and Dublin. Raymond O'Donnell, the director of music at Galway Cathedral, and David Leigh, the assistant organist of St Patrick's Cathedral, continued the theme started last week by David Adams: large works were placed on either side of two groups of short chorale preludes from the Orgelbüchlein.
Raymond O'Donnell's playing ranged from the lively and authoritative to the uncertain. Some of the preludes, especially the lamenting, aria-style O Mensch, bewein' BWV622, were nicely played.
However, it was disconcerting that obvious slips of technique occurred in some of the easiest preludes, while the much more difficult Sonata in D minor BWV527 was comparatively secure. Above all, O'Donnell did well in the Prelude and Fugue in A minor BWV543, where the notoriously knotty fugue romped along with clear part-writing and suitable exuberance.
David Leigh's 14 preludes completed this series' presentation of the Orgelbüchlein. He shaped each prelude through its melody, even when that melody was well-hidden by elaborate counterpoint. That approach and some colourful registration emphasised the variety of these pieces.
Leigh's robust playing was a pleasure to listen to in these preludes, and in the notoriously difficult Sonata in E flat BWV525 and the Prelude and Fugue in C minor BWV546. Music that epitomises compositional craft was complemented by the craft of organ playing - not just technically reliable, but deeply musical.- Martin Adams
Series continues at 7 p.m. on Tuesday and Thursday with Peter Barley and Tristan Russcher.
La vestale, Wexford Festival Opera
The Wexford Festival's outgoing artistic director, Luigi Ferrari, opened his first festival, back in October 1995, with an early romantic Italian opera from 1840, Pacini's Saffo. And on Thursday he opened his last festival in the same vein, with another work from 1840, this time by the composer he has most favoured at Wexford over the last decade, Saverio Mercadante (1795-1870).
It's easy to see why Ferrari finds Mercadante so fascinating. He was an operatic reformer, who chose to pitch his skills against what he saw as the prevailing operatic failings and excesses of the day. And for modern listeners he's a sort of missing link between the days of Rossini, Bellini and Donizetti and the era of Verdi. Mercadante's La vestale follows a story that's familiar in outline from Spontini's rather better-known La vestale (1807), which Wexford presented in 1979, a quarter of a century ago. A Vestal virgin neglects her sacred duties when reunited with a lover she had believed lost to her. In the libretto prepared for Mercadante by Salvadore Cammarano, both lovers come to an operatically tragic end.
Mercadante's opera, however, neglects to provide one of the things most people expect in opera - a extended platform for solo singing. It concentrates instead on duets and ensembles, with some finely-wrought use of the chorus (especially good in distraught mode) thrown in for good measure.
At a level of finer detail, there are nuances for the specialist to pore over, seeking out the kind of differentiation that car enthusiasts so delight in when distinguishing the tell-tale minutiae of badges, bumpers and trim that identify models from different years.
The singing in Wexford on Thursday showed more signs of strength than subtlety. Too many of the duets sounded more competitive than collaborative, and too many of the singers showed an interest in pressing the music for emotional outcomes it's unlikely to yield.
The most successful characterisation came from Mexican tenor Dante Alcalá as the believably impassioned, though notalways pitch-accurate, Decio, returning from battle to find his beloved Emilia has become a Vestal virgin.
The affecting qualities of the Emilia of the young Italian soprano Doriana Milazzo, well evidenced in her Act III delirium, were often swamped by other singers. One of the culprits in this regard was the Polish mezzo soprano, Agata Bienkowska, as the loyal friend, Giunia.
Bienkowska made some smoky-toned, fervent amends in Giunia's consideration of Emilia's shattered heart at the start of Act II.
Sadly, conductor Paolo Arrivabeni made no more of Mercadante's music than he did in Wexford's last Mercadante production four years ago.
However, the Cracow Philharmonic Orchestra, making its festival début, played with greater consistency than the National Philharmonic Orchestra of Belarus, which it replaced. But fine responses to the music from either players or conductor were not the order of the day.
Thomas de Mallet Burgess's production (with some dreadful semaphoring for the chorus laid on by movement director Maxine Braham) seemed unsure quite how or where to take the opera. Jamie Vartan's costumes and sets veered between genuine elegance and a sort of science-fiction movie chic. - Michael Dervan
Wexford Festival Opera continues until Sunday 31st (053-22144).
