Irish Times critics give their verdicts on Anastacia in The Point, Andrew Johnstone and Mark Duley in Trinity College Chapel, Jane Irwin and Garry Magee with RTÉ NSO/Gansch
in the National Concert Hall in Dublin and The Killers in the Olympia Theatre.
Anastacia
The Point, Dublin
By Anna Carey
The T-shirts on sale in the foyer outside Anastacia's first ever Dublin show are emblazoned with the words "Survivor Chick". Having successfully battled cancer and experienced debilitating Crohn's Disease, it's a pretty accurate description of the southern belle with the booming voice. The Point is packed with hugely enthusiastic fans, and their affection for the diminutive woman on stage is palpable.
Anastacia describes her music as "sprock" - a combination of soul, pop and rock. It's a pretty accurate description, although "kind of boring" would do as well. Anastacia herself is a charming stage performer, bantering easily with the enormous crowd, and though her slightly nasal singing voice isn't to everyone's taste, she can deliver a song with impressive panache. It's just that the songs themselves are pretty dull, and after the first hour, they all start sounding like one long cross between Stevie Wonder and Pat Benatar.
The star and her dancers, however, do put on quite a show. Two fans - selected through a radio competition - take to the stage to sing with their heroine and so compete in "Anastacia Idol" , a singing competition that has been running throughout the entire tour and whose winner will appear in the video for Anastacia's next single. And to facilitate Anastacia's costume changes, there are regular and bewilderingly lengthy dance interludes; the most impressive of these involves a dancer performing astonishing acrobatics while hanging 20 feet off the crowd from a long bolt of fabric. When it ends, a light goes on in the middle of the auditorium to reveal Anastacia on a small platform, where she performs a couple of acoustic numbers. It's all totally theatrical stuff, but it just about works. An anti-war dance routine is even cheesier, but its heart is in the right place.
And it's hard not to wish this likeable "survivor chick" well. But I never want to hear any sprock again.
Andrew Johnstone, Mark Duley (organ)
Trinity College Chapel
By Martin Adams
Plenty of organists could have shaved at least 10 minutes off the 75 that Andrew Johnstone took here in a sequence of chorale preludes for Lent and Easter, plus large works at the beginning, end and middle. His playing might have been too slow for some, but not for this pair of ears.
As another organist well-known for his ability to sustain a slow tempo once quipped to me, it's easy to play fast. That is a serious point. To play slowly you have to make everything count. That is what Andrew Johnstone did so well on this occasion, creating a clarity of texture that was produced not only by making each line independent, but by making the figures within each line work in discourse, so that there was a perpetual and ever-shifting play of energy between the parts.
Thursday's recital was given by the director of Pipeworks (the Dublin International Organ Festival), Mark Duley. He went for it with an energy that was full of risk, but that seemed appropriate for his programme.
His playing seemed a microcosm of the creative imagination with which he devised the entire series. Two Preludes and Fugues in C, BWV531 and 545, opened and closed the recital; in the centre was Bach's arrangement of the Prince of Weimar's Concerto in G BWV592; and on either side of that were large chorale settings of hymns for Pentecost. All the pieces were in related keys, between each piece there was the briefest of pauses, and the style of registration was a variation on a single theme - rich colours given an edge by strong reeds. Everything seemed to be shaped around a central idea - the preternatural energy of Pentecost.
Series continues at 7 p.m. on Tuesday, November 16th with David Lee and on Thursday, November 18th with Peter Barley
Jane Irwin - Garry Magee with RTÉ NSO/Gansch
NCH, Dublin
By Michael Dungan
Schubert - Symphony No 3 Strauss - Till Eulenspiegel Mahler - Des Knaben Wunderhorn
The RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra was a little slow getting out of the gates. Under visiting conductor Christian Gansch, some of the weightiness of the slow introduction to Schubert's Symphony No 3 carried over into what should have been a sunny, Mozartian Allegro con brio. There were tuning accidents in the winds.
Growing fears of a long night were allayed, however, in the ensuing movements. Gansch achieved a dainty elegance in Schubert's thinly-textured Allegretto and an earthy, distinctly un-courtly dance energy in both the minuet and in the finale's whirling tarantella. And it was the woodwind principals who really shone in a work that spotlit their roles to the point of sounding like chamber music.
This was followed by an animated performance of Strauss's orchestral portrait of the mischievous prankster Till Eulenspiegel.
Gansch, by vigorously exploiting the full extent of Strauss's broad orchestral palette, ensured that characters and narrative were colourfully brought to life. The brass and again the woodwinds sounded particularly well.
For us, living in an age when Hollywood supplies a happy ending for almost every story, it can be hard to tap into the 19th-century German mind-set that requires that lovable Till ultimately hangs from a noose for his harmless mischief.
Likewise, some of the competing sentiments in Mahler's song-settings from Des Knaben Wunderhorn call for a brave shift to a similar mind-set. Totalling 12 in all, the songs bring together a strange mix of marching and military imagery, lyrical expressions of love and the plain weird (a donkey adjudicating a singing contest between birds, a saint preaching to fish).
But the music is always beautiful - moving, sincere, and surprisingly unsentimental - and the performance by mezzo Jane Irwin and baritone Garry Magee was understated and warm, perfectly sidelining those mind-set challenges.
The Killers
Olympia Theatre, Dublin
By Peter Crawley
This is murder. The Olympia is flooding with hysteria and the box office is no longer polite about it. Yes, the concert is sold out; no, there will be no more tickets; now go away. People are pleading. Touts are on the verge of tears. This is, hands down, the gig of the year.
The Killers, four ridiculously good-looking 20-somethings - as if you didn't already know - possess a chic ennui that can only be learned from Las Vegas. Anyone who mocks singer Brandon Flowers for writing about "promenades in the rain", fails to realise that Vegas really does have promenades - and Sphinxes, Eiffel Towers, and a Caesar's Palace too.
In short, The Killers have seen it all. So if they decide that the most exciting music possible is a histrionic confluence of New Wave synths, dizzy disco beats, U2 guitar chimes and majestically daft lyrics, you'd better pay attention.
Emblematic of 2004 - the year of new bands, instant highs and incandescence - the set is not a slow-burner. It's a detonation.
Sauntering onstage to Can't Take My Eyes Off You, they play out the next urgent hour as though the oxygen supply is dwindling. Flowers, devastatingly beautiful in a suit as unruffled as his brow, never invests his slinky synth hooks with more effort than necessary. He is a man for whom nonchalance doesn't seem worth the effort.
This sartorial-phlegmatic stance couldn't be more startling when pitched to the empowering self-absorption of The Cure, or Duran Duran's chilly mania. When you sing along to Jenny Was a Friend of Mine, Mr Brightside, Smile Like You Mean It, or Andy, You're a Star, you are invincible. The brilliant subversion of Somebody Told Me, however, deserves more effort; preferably even sweat.
Still, in the agony and ecstasy of a prolonged All These Things That I've Done, The Killers own the ether. Franz Ferdinand are indisputably the band of now. The Killers, however, are the band of right now.
