Today's reviews include the panto classic Jack and the Beanstalk and a performance by ex-Stone Roses singer Ian Brown.
Jack and the Beanstalk,
Gaiety
By Bernice Harrison
As a story, it's a classic in the panto repertoire - a poor mother, a helpful son, a handful of magic beans and a big scary giant. Filling it out into a full-length show takes a lot of verve, pacy direction and a tight funny script.
On Thursday's opening night of the Gaiety panto Jack and the Beanstalk the verve was there all right in the performances given by Gaiety regulars Brian Ormond, Richie Hayes, Susan McFadden and Billie Traynor and panto newcomers Declan Conlon, David Pearse and Michelle Donnelly.
It was the newcomers who gave the strongest performances, Conlon as the excellently creepy baddie, Donnelly as the sweet learner fairy, or "furry" as she'd say with her instantly funny strangulated Dart accent, and most of all Pearse who played the baddie's sidekick as an hilarious cross between Richard III and Fester from the Adamms family.
When Pearse came on we got a glimpse of what this panto could have been if the script by Martin Higgins hadn't been so dreary and the direction by Carole Todd so dull and uninventive.
Apart from the excellent cast there was so much that could have been done with the stunning set and, in particular, the massive giant in his castle. There was only one decent gag, far too little slapstick and the actors were given very little to work with.
The choice of songs - and there was a lot of them - was also downright odd - Ghostbusters and You're the One That I Want are positively geriatric and isn't there a panto convention that the writer takes a current pop song and replaces one or two lyrics to make it funny?
And for a young audience is there really any need for a bump and grind number whose constant refrain is "sexy, everything about you is so sexy".
But the choreography also by Carole Todd and the dancers, led by Thomas Spratt, were superb, lifting the show and lighting up the theatre. They were helped by the foot-perfect children from the Billie Barry School. This year at the Gaiety it was more like a variety musical with good props, than a traditional panto. Fee, fi, ho, hum.
Radu Lupu (piano)
NCH, Dublin
By Michael Dervan
Beethoven - 32 Variations in C minor Berg - Sonata Op 1
Beethoven - Sonata in A Op 101 Schubert - Sonata in G D894
Radu Lupu is one of the finest exponents of the caressing gesture on the piano. He's a player who can rid the instrument of all suggestion of percussive attack and bring a sound into being with the delicacy of a breath.
He can make the richest of chords seem to emerge slowly, rather than catch your attention all at once, as most players might deliver it, with precision as if from nowhere.
He does all this while seated in a most unorthodox way, sitting close to the keyboard on a chair rather than a piano stool, and with his back arched away from the instrument.
The high point of his National Concert Hall/The Irish Times celebrity recital on Thursday was his handling of Alban Berg's Op. 1, originally planned as the start of a three-movement of a piano sonata but about which Berg accepted the advice of his teacher, Schoenberg, that the movement he had written could stand satisfactorily on its own.
The best performances of this highly-chromatic piece are the ones which pay attention to fathoming its harmonic ebb and flow. Most players tend to get mesmerised by the linear intricacy, the stretching and intertwining of melodies.
Lupu attended well to these contrapuntal concerns, but he also attended, with uncommon concentration, to the music's harmonic push and pull.
He did this without any sense of false emphasis, as if by just willing it he could make it all perfectly clear to the listener. The result was one of the richest and most absorbing accounts it's been my pleasure to hear of this compact and expressively potent work.
The opening performance of Beethoven's 32 Variations in C minor was more than a little brittle and unsettled, but Lupu was clearly in the groove for the two later sonatas by Beethoven and Schubert.
There was a mesmerising quality here, the performer drawing the listener into the magic of the moment, through a sense of intimacy and a finely-honed skill in the sculpting of gesture.
It was hard not to wonder what the results might be if Lupu were ever to turn his attention to that master of the micro gestures, Morton Feldman, whose music he would seem exceptionally well equipped to play.
Ian Brown
Olympia
By Kevin Courtney
It's Ian Brown's fifth wedding anniversary, but everyone in the Olympia Theatre has a reason to celebrate. Eight years after the demise of The Stone Roses, the band's former lead singer is belting out Made Of Stone, as nonchalantly as you like, and the crowd is grinning as though Christmas has come two-and-a-half weeks early. Brown is too skinny to pass as Santa Claus, but tonight he's handing out a sackful of Stone Roses oldies, and the loyal fans raise their arms aloft to catch the chestnuts.
The Mancunian with the simian features has chosen an odd method of promoting his new album, Solarized, he's decided to resurrect his old band's repertoire. As the familiar bassline from She Bangs The Drums booms out, Brown delivers the vocals in his off-key drone of old, and all is well with the world.
Sugar Spun Sister and Sally Cinnamon are the icing on the Christmas cake, but Waterfall is a champagne supernova of pop nostalgia.
Brown's backing band includes two members of Stone Roses tribute band Fool's Gold, but with King Monkey himself up front, this is probably the closest we'll get to the real thing.
In between the Roses classics, Brown drops tracks from new album, Solarized, including Longsight M13, Destiny or Circumstances, The Sweet Fantastic and new single, Time Is My Everything.
Far from turning the crowd off, however, Brown's own tunes just fire them up even more, with their insistent beats and tightly-coiled grooves. Keep What Ya Got, co-written with Noel Gallagher, bridges that chasm between Oasis and The Chemical Brothers, while F.E.A.R.'s pendulous strings brings the gig to a dizzy climax.
Simon Mawhinney (piano)
Bank of Ireland Arts Centre, Dublin
By Michael Dervan
Pierre Boulez - Notations. Scott McLaughlin - The Veil Nebula. Simon Mawhinney - Sulaymaniyyih
György Ligeti - Musica ricercata
The Armagh-born pianist and composer Simon Mawhinney gave a lunchtime recital for the Association of Irish Composers at the Bank of Ireland Arts Centre.
His programme consisted entirely of young men's music, pieces by Pierre Boulez (the Notations of 1945) and György Ligeti (the Musica ricercata of 1951-53) that the two composers only allowed into print long after the event, in 1985 and 1995, respectively, and more recent works by himself and Scott McLaughlin.
The strictness of the epigrammatic Notations was for Boulez a liberating leap towards the new music which would emerge in the immediate post-war years. The tight focus of Ligeti's Musica ricercata, with its extraordinary self-imposed limitations (two notes for the first of the 11 pieces, three for the second, and so on) enabled him balance his own inclinations against the strictures of a communist state.
Between these two landmark works, Mawhinney played the The Veil Nebula, written two years ago by Scott McLaughlin (born 1975), all impressionistic glitter and haze, with occasional darker rumblings.
Mawhinney's own Sulaymaniyyih, named after a mountainous region of Iraq, was written in 1996, when the composer was 20. He describes it as an organic growth of dressed up triads, though the consistent, elaborate filigree of its embellishments mostly obliterates the starting point, like a Christmas tree disappearing under the profusion of its decorations.
Mawhinney is an ardent performer, and he played all four works with firmness and conviction. The effect of his playing, however, was rather rough, with too ready an equation between intensity and volume, and too little attention paid at crucial moments to the necessity to play softly.
The style of playing was of the kind that, in spite of its arresting manner, is apt to diminish differences between works rather than highlight them.
