Today's reviews are of Rain Partyat the Project/Cultivate Centre in Dublin, From Both Hipsat Cork Arts Theatre and the RTE National Symphony Orchestraat the National Concert Hall in Dublin.
Rain Party
Project/Cultivate Centre, Dublin
Michael Seaver
Audiences probably expect Junk Ensemble's Rain Party to be about rain.
Collecting their ticket at Project's box office, they check in their shoes for a pair of wellies, a brolly with individual instructions, and a steaming mug of hot chocolate complete with marshmallow. By the time they process through Temple Bar to the Cultivate Centre, they begin to feel like party guests, but still have to walk the gentle gauntlet of an emptying watercan tipped by an unseen dancer in the passageway to the courtyard.
Here, solitary goldfish peer out of bowls scattered among the plants and a simple chalked trail lead through tiny journeys among the plants that are booby-trapped with tape recorders asking to be played, radios to be tuned and music boxes not to be touched.
Quietly guided to a pair of benches, the guests sit and the two performers appear - identical twins, similarly armed with wellies and brollies. They dance a gently repeating eight count dance phrase, punctuated by anxious glances at a pocket watch. In another part of the garden they prepare a birthday party, in another one of them drowns, and soon thoughts of rain are replaced by memories, and how transient and illusive they are.
This subtle manipulation is at the heart of Megan and Jessica Kennedy's choreography for Junk Ensemble. Choosing simple fable rather than turgid novel - and in Rain Party site specific rather than proscenium - they don't get stressed about choreographic development or structure. That would be almost too pompous: their choice, along with director Jo Timmins, is a more modest facilitation of their audience's imagination where every hint - a frying fish or a packet of Lemsip - is carefully chosen with both a furrowed brow and a knowing wink.
Rain Party reminds us how our memories are as impermanent as the chalk scribbles under rain and as unreliable as the song with made-up words. A Polaroid photo, given to one member of the audience, remains the only evidence of our presence at this party.
•Runs until tomorrow
From Both Hips
Cork Arts Theatre
Mary Leland
Mark O'Rowe's play From Both Hips is little more than a romp and can work quite well even when performed without sophistication. This is the case with the presentation by Rampart Players at the Cork Arts Theatre, where a talented but perhaps too obedient cast has been pressed into roles just a little bit beyond its individual members.
The play concerns an adulterous husband, the garda who shot him accidentally, the wives of both men and a ruthlessly well-intentioned sister-in-law. This superficially comic outline could grow into something darker or more threatening in another reading, but director Maria O'Donovan is content to let her cast deliver the clever writing without too much personal interference.
•Runs until tomorrow
RTÉ NSO/Maloney
NCH, Dublin
Michael Dervan
Krzysztof Penderecki - Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima. John Kinsella - Montage II. Symphony No 7.
The RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra's Horizons series is a kind of composers' choice for orchestra. RTÉ chooses an Irish composer, the Irish composer in turn chooses a programme based around his or her music. It's not quite that simple, of course, as not all the composers' choices have been allowed, as this week's composer, John Kinsella (a former head of music at RTÉ) made clear in his pre-concert talk.
Kinsella's original idea was to present the Dublin premiere of his own Seventh Symphony (first heard in Cork in 1999) in tandem with Sibelius's Seventh, which dates from 1924. When the Sibelius was ruled too mainstream, his second choice was a pair of shorter pieces, Krzysztof Penderecki's most celebrated work, the Threnody for the victims of Hiroshima of 1960, and his own Montage II of 1970.
Penderecki's style in the 1960s, rich in novel effects and unorthodox means of sound production, is familiar to millions who hardly know his name. His music was used to provide the pervading sense of menace on the soundtrack of Stanley Kubrick's The Shining. The German musicologist Karl H Wörner left an early description of the Threnody as "a profoundly disturbing piece of apparently hopeless cataclysmic atmosphere in a highly individual technique of composition and instrumentation". It is music that's intended to grate and get under the skin, which it usually does without any difficulty.
Kinsella's Montage II, premiered in 1971 in a programme that also featured the Penderecki, is both more conventional and more daring. It uses the avant-garde techniques of the 1960s to create a kind of freeze-frame psychodrama, intercutting disturbing past and calm present from the life of an elderly man who had fought in the first World War. Kinsella doesn't drive his ideas with the intensity of Penderecki, but the conception remains an intriguing one.
Gavin Maloney conducted what were mostly oddly polite performances of both pieces, as if raw strangeness in music were something to be filtered out rather than highlighted. Both Penderecki and Kinsella, of course, have long since left the experimentalism of the avant-garde behind, and returned to much more traditional sounds and processes. Perhaps, as a bright young man of the early 21st century, Maloney is already viewing these early pieces through the softening perspective of the two composers' later music.
Kinsella's Seventh Symphony is cast in a single, 25-minute movement, with a range of points of contact and departure with Sibelius's Seventh which clearly fascinate the composer.
The piece works best when the energy is clean and clear, the rhythmic drive firm. The transitions from section to section are skilfully negotiated, so the feeling of overall continuity is well maintained. But the sense of organic growth and development diminishes considerably in slower sections, and the feeling of long-term trajectory remains limited.
The piece uses a distant off-stage choir (the National Chamber Choir) at the end, a gesture that promised rather more than it delivered in this performance.
