Blink 182 in The Point, Gilad Atzmon's Orient House Ensemble in the Temple Bar Music Centre and Unland-Boianov, NCC/Antunes in the National Gallery, Dublin.
Blink 182
The Point
By Peter Crawley
Although it is expressly forbidden by the venue and largely discouraged by chiropractors, moshing can be a force for change. Before the US elections, in fact, the demotic outrage of Eminem's deliberately leaked single, Mosh, bristled with political upheaval.
And didn't Tom DeLonge, Blink 182's guitar shredder and spokesman for mall-rat punk, recently share a podium with Senator John Kerry? Ok, so neither was effective, but as pockets of "mosh circles" appear - in which pumped-up teenagers slam into each other like colliding particles - DeLonge must have plenty to say.
"Guess how I got the name Tom!" his nasally Californian whine enquires. "Coz I licked the butthole of a dead cat!" Well, bang goes that theory.
No, the appeal of Blink 182's ferociously fast and abrasive punk-pop, matched with a sense of humour that Tommy Tiernan might find insensitive, holds much the same revolutionary potential as falling off your skateboard at speed. That appeal is also age-specific, although those following a wizened path towards their thirties may feel a jolt of energy in the hyper kinetic assaults of What's My Age Again?, The Rock Show, First Date and, especially, All the Small Things.
The efforts of Blink 182's last album (their sixth) to hint at maturity, are just about tolerated tonight, with bassist/vocalist Mark Hoppus even apologising for a song that's "slow and sad". Actually it is neither, but calling for a display of mobile phones, not lighters, Hoppus transforms The Point into something beautiful - a twinkling galaxy of blue and white stars.
Better still are spitting introductions such as, "This song is going to make you pregnant!" Won over by such potency, even Travis Barker's ridiculous drum solo (delivered from a secret podium in the crowd) seems indispensable. At such moments the turbo-racket of dissing your parents and griping about girl trouble feels timeless, universal even.
But more often, anyone the wrong side of 16 seems unconvinced; the security staff, this writer and, occasionally, the three members of Blink 182.
Unland-Boianov, NCC/Antunes
National Gallery, Dublin
By Michael Dervan
Thursday's National Gallery programme from the National Chamber Choir was a celebration in music of the gallery's German Dream exhibition of romantic paintings from the Nationalgalerie in Berlin.
The large body of romantic German choral music is nowadays but poorly represented in concert programmes. I'm not thinking of works like Brahms's German Requiem or Mendelssohn's Elijah, which are still beloved of choral societies everywhere.
Move away from the world of the oratorio and you'll find a corpus of music written for amateur and domestic performance. Schubert, Schumann, Mendelssohn and Brahms willingly fed a ready market. Brahms, for instance, was far more prolific in writing choral music than in producing the orchestral, chamber or solo piano music for which he is now much better known. The well-known Liebeslieder Waltzes, for vocal quartet and piano duet are but the tip of the proverbial iceberg.
It's hardly surprising then, that the German Dream connection found the NCC stepping quite outside the programming norms that have been established under artistic director Celso Antunes. The opening work he chose was Brahms's Schicksalslied, for chorus and orchestra, performed with piano accompaniment.
Given the unusually ethereal character of the orchestral writing, it's hard to imagine a more foolhardy undertaking than a public performance of this piece with piano reduction, and the severe limitations of the often sour-toned small instrument provided for the Bulgarian-born German pianist Stanislav Unland-Boianov made a difficult task well nigh impossible. Nor did the unfortunate pianist stand much of a chance in his solo contributions of short pieces by Schumann.
Antunes steered the choir through pieces by Schubert, Reger, Webern and Mahler, before rounding off with the final number from Brahms's second Liebeslieder set. His carefully sculpted style, which has provided so much pleasure over a very wide repertoire, here seemed a little too self-consciously intrusive on the music's natural flow.
The pieces that came off best were Webern's early Entflieht auf leichten Kähnen and Clytus Gottwald's extraordinary choral recasting of Mahler's song, Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen.
As in the choir's first performance of this piece under Marcus Creed last year, this was a totally absorbing choral tour-de-force.
Gilad Atzmon's Orient House Ensemble
Temple Bar Music Centre
By Ray Comiskey
When clarinettist, soprano and alto saxophonist Gilad Atzmon was last here with his Orient House Ensemble, several years ago, it was a quartet and the leader, a pro-Palestinian Israeli, made much of his musical political points with humour. Back in Dublin again, the group has become a sextet with Frank Harrison (piano) and Asaf Sirkis (drums), joined by Yaron Savi (in on bass in place of Oli Hayhurst), Romano Viazzani (accordion) and O.D. Fratila (violin). And, in a world which has grown darker and more dangerous, the music reflects more overt anger and pain than it did in the past. "We used to be an ordinary anti-Zionist band," he told the audience at the Temple Bar Music Centre last night, "but now we are anti-everything." Well, not quite. Most of the material played was taken from his latest CD, musiK: Re-Arranging The 20th Century, and like his new recording, was full of moments of great beauty, anger, pain and a myriad of cross-cultural references, taken from Balkan idioms, klezmer, Argentinian tango and even bop - Joven, Hermosa y Triste, Surfing, Tutu Tango and Lili Marleen. But it was, if anything, more heavily freighted politically than any music I've heard from him in the past.
For example, Re-Arranging The 20th Century was specifically dedicated to what he termed "the Axis of Evil, Bush, Blair and Sharon, the three most horrible people on this planet" (where does that leave Osama Bin Laden?). Opening with a lovely, slow grace, it exchanged the early mood for one of anger and a kind of organised chaos. Restored to beauty, it lurched into a grotesquely comic and, paradoxically, satirical mode, with references to Roll Out The Barrel, Mack The Knife and, with more political point, It Ain't Necessarily So, to a conclusion that carried the faintest hints of Blood Count.
It was all executed with aplomb by a group without a single weak link, in which Atzmon, Fratila, Viazzani and Harrison in particular were superb soloists, capable of encompassing the range from lyric delicacy to outrage demanded by the material.
Unlike the new CD from which it was drawn, however, the concert had its longueurs and occasional self-indulgence. And, for all the brilliance, colour and crispness of the ensemble, somehow there was little sense of discovery or surprise in the music, which seems to have settled into what may be for the band a well-worn path. Perhaps, in focusing so much on the politics - and there's no doubting the depth and sincerity of Atzmon's courageous commitment to his political beliefs - something has bled from the music; the CD sounds fresher and more persuasive.
