Andrea Bocelli, The Most Lamentable Tragedy of Romeo & Juliet, NCC/Duijck OLCS, RTÉCO/Ó Duinn, David Adams and David Leigh.
Andrea Bocelli
Odyssey Arena, Belfast
Music by Puccini, Leoncavallo, Tosti, Denza, Lehar, de Curtis, di Capua and others
This was a concert like no other. For one thing, everyone was miked - Bocelli himself, soprano Paola Sanguinetti, and the Czech National Symphony Orchestra. The only person not to have a microphone was conductor Marcello Rota. It was like hearing an entire concert through a public address system, and as with Pavarotti at Stormont some years ago one wondered what Bocelli sounds like without electronic aid. The huge amplification turned a croon into a blast.
The voice was easy to listen to so long as he stuck to popular Neapolitan songs, though Sanguinetti's high notes were distinctly stronger. E lucevan le stelle did not convey much in the way of feeling or range or fullness of tone, and the Boheme duet was spoiled by a forced, interpolated high C.
To say that the audience wasn't worried would be an understatement. The Odyssey Arena is huge, and the audience would have filled the Waterfront Hall comfortably, and probably twice over. They applauded each number as soon as they recognised it, which was usually in the middle of the first phrase, and shouted encouragement to their idol, who communicates a winning bashful charm on the platform. It was instructive to see so many people paying so much for admittance and so obviously enjoying the music, though they talked and were still finding their seats in the Ruslan Overture. Nineteenth-century opera performances might have had some of this informal atmosphere - although in those days the singers managed without microphones. Dermot Gault
The Most Lamentable Tragedy of Romeo & Juliet
O'Reilly Theatre
Yes, it is Shakespeare, but with a mostly comic difference. Geoff Gould, directing for the new Blood in the Alley Productions, has reverted to the all-male casting of the original productions, but hardly in the manner of those far-off days.
He sets the play in a school in Verona in the 1920s, with the Prince as the school principal and Capulet and Montague as his housemasters. The pupils are, of course, unruly to the point of lethal feuding.
The major departure from the norm comes with the appearance of the legendary lovers, both bespectacled. Romeo is a large, amicable fellow who speaks well, and Juliet a kind of prissy head girl who delivers her lines staccato-style. It is immediately clear that no grand passion, intense enough to fill the final stage with corpses will come of this - and there goes tragedy.
Moving on without a great love affair to sustain it, the production branches out in other directions. The text has been trimmed, and a number of minor roles dropped. Eight actors take the rest, with the females as comic leads. John Anthony Murphy is a very funny Nurse, and Lady Capulet (Colin Howdie) is an angular stick, unavoidably since she doubles for Count Paris. Jack Laskey's Juliet strikes out into po-faced melodrama right to her suicide.
The actors generally take their comedy seriously, really the only way to go here, and keep it from drifting into farce. They speak clearly and well, even given a mix of accents from Cockney to Cork, and Scottish to posh English. Andrew Musselman's Romeo, despite the opening impression, speaks the immortal lines so beautifully as to grow into an acceptable lover and tilt the whole towards credibility.
This is Shakespeare minus the poetry and the passion; but it is good fun, and faithful to the Bard in its fashion. Gerry Colgan
NCC/Duijck
National Gallery, Dublin
Schütz - O lieber Herre Gott. Es ist erschienen. Also hat Gott die Welt geliebt.
Distler - Also hat Gott die Welt geliebt.
Mendelssohn - Mein Herz erhebet Gott, den Herrn.
Schütz - Das ist je gewisslich wahr.
Distler - Das ist je gewisslich wahr.
Vic Nees - Magnificat.
The National Chamber Choir opened Immortals, its three-concert winter series, under visiting conductor Johan Duijck at the National Gallery on Thursday evening.
Duijck, director of the Flemish Radio Choir and of the Academy of St Martin-in-the-Fields Chorus in London, chose Heinrich Schütz as his "Immortal" and included pieces by Hugo Distler and Vic Nees in a programme which he aptly described as "Schütz and his shadows".
The programme showed the line of descent from organist and composer Schütz, who studied with Gabrieli Giovanni and brought the Venetian polyphonic style to German church music in the 17th century, to Distler, his 20th-century counterpart whom Nazism and the war drove to commit suicide in Berlin in 1942.
Back-to-back performances of motets on identical texts by both composers provided the most striking illustration of the connection. Both Also hat Gott die Welt Geliebt ("For God so loved the world") and Das ist je gewisslich wahr ("Here is a true saying") revealed Distler's light leavening of Schütz's language with post-romantic harmonic colouring.
Much of this is intricate, busy music whose interweaving linearities were expressively illuminated by the hallmark precision and vocal unanimity of the National Chamber Choir.
Duijck drew more from his singers in the more emotionally outright Distler. Schütz's sacred music, while beautifully crafted, is less dramatic than that of his mentor Gabrielli, and loses something of its essence when it's not sung in the kind of expansive church acoustic for which it was originally intended.
In fact the best performance of the evening came in the constantly changing moods and imagery of the Magnificat by Vic Nees (born 1936), whom Duijck described as the most important of contemporary Flemish composers of choral music. Catherine Redding was warm, clear and impeccably controlled in the work's soprano solo.
The National Chamber Choir's Immortals series continues at the National Gallery with conductors Terry Edwards (Gesualdo) on November 18th and Celso Antunes (Bach) on December 2nd. Michael Dungan
OLCS, RTÉCO/Ó Duinn
NCH, Dublin
Elgar - Dream of Gerontius.
There was a full house at the National Concert Hall on Thursday for a performance of Elgar's Dream of Gerontius as part of UCD's 150th anniversary celebrations.
The associations of the occasion were rich indeed. The text that Elgar set, depicting the journey of a soul, was written by John Henry Newman, who founded the Catholic University in 1854. And the main auditorium of the NCH was itself for many years the Aula Maxima of UCD.
Our Lady's Choral Society has had a closer association with Elgar's oratorio than any other Irish choir, and the choir's current music director, Proinnsías Ó Duinn, has long shown his own deep affection for the work through his performances.
On Thursday Ó Duinn was hampered by the inescapable fact that the RTÉ Concert Orchestra doesn't have a large enough string section to create either the weight of tone or range of sonorities that Elgar's score suggests.
Within those constraints, however, this performance was lovingly, atmospherically shaped. Curiously, the pliable choral contributions of Our Lady's Choral Society, fresh in tone and stronger in the upper parts, actually outclassed those of the semi-chorus provided by the UCD Scholars, whose singing was clean but dryly clinical in its effect, and conveyed hardly any sense of connective line.
Tenor John Elwes was always committed as the soul in transition, but there was something effortful in his singing that created a sense of struggle which rarely seemed entirely apt.
The Angel of mezzo soprano Alison Browner showed a noble restraint, the voice illuminated, as it were, by a warm inner glow. And bass baritone Ian Caddy was in commanding, stentorian form as The Priest and The Angel of the Agony. Michael Dervan
David Adams, David Leigh (organ)
Trinity College Chapel
The Clavierübung (keyboard practice) is among the handful of works by Bach published during the composer's lifetime.
All four parts, published between 1726 and 1741, are crowning achievements for the genres they represent. For example, the last part consists of the Goldberg Variations.
The third part of the Clavierübung is one of the most sophisticated musical publications of all time. As a collection that exhaustively explores the technical possibilities of composition on an existing melody (cantus firmus), it sums up the techniques that had shaped sacred music since the renaissance. In that respect no subsequent composer has come anywhere near it.
Tuesday's and Thursday's recitals in this complete Bach series, given respectively by David Adams and David Leigh, presented Clavierübung III in the order of Bach's original. The Prelude and the Fugue of BWV552 open and close the book; between are 21 chorale preludes that explore chorale melodies based on the hymns central to Lutheranism.
In the hands of such experienced and capable organists, this music made the profound impression that Bach must have intended. It was doubly interesting to hear it played by musicians so different in character, yet so aware that this peerless statement of musical and religious values demands the best of them.
David Leigh tended to lead his preludes with the cantus firmus, thus establishing a clear relationship between the given material and Bach's elaboration of it. He thereby set himself challenges of shaping; and he met them handsomely.
David Adams was more inclined to emphasise the models on which the preludes are based - trio sonata, French overture, vocal motet and so on. There and in the Toccata, Adagio and Fugue BWV564 that closed his recital, he was a master of stylistic variety. In the astonishingly elaborate Fugue from BWV552 that ended Thursday's recital, David Leigh played with a clarity of part-writing and a majesty of progress that made a perfect conclusion to two of the best recitals in an excellent series.
Series continues on Tuesday and Thursday at 7.00 pm with Andrew Johnstone and Mark Duley. Michael Adams
