Reviews today are of the Ingrid Laubrock Quintetat the Mermaid Arts Centre, Bray, To Have & To Holdat the Old Museum, Belfast and Roe, Cleary, Quinn at the NCH John Field Room, Dublin
Ingrid Laubrock Quintet
Mermaid Arts Centre, Bray
Ray Comiskey
On tour for Music Network, the quintet led by saxophonist Ingrid Laubrock produced an absorbing, deservedly well-received night's music. The group, with the leader on tenor, was completed by Barry Green (piano), Ben Davis (cello), Larry Bartley (bass) and Stuart Ritchie (drums), and played with an impressively focused lucidity that made light of the often complex performances asked of it.
Laubrock, much recorded on soprano in recent times, has a lovely tenor sound, rounded, warm and soft, yet robustly full and expressive. She also has a singularly individual sense of line, and a willingness to go out on a limb repeatedly, which, added to her other gifts - including those as a composer with a real sense of group dynamics - made for frequently compelling listening.
That sense of adventure included a rhythmic flexibility evident throughout in a fondness for rubato playing and unusual time signatures, epitomised by the gentle, quite beautiful opening, Clara, written for her mother.
A second piece, whose name I failed to catch, offered an equally engrossing example of what the quintet could do with relatively slender materials. It included, in addition, a superb tenor solo.
That was just one of many; there was particularly arresting tenor work on the playful Hannah, and on the second set's opener, on the mournful, nostalgic Back Home, with the band reduced to tenor, cello and drums, and on Pissed, an evocation of that not-altogether blissful state.
While the blend of tenor and cello worked beautifully, there was also deft use of different instrumental combinations for colour, contrast and drama.
And both Green and Davis are fine players, like Bartley and Ritchie, sensitively attuned to Laubrock's music, in a group whose control of dynamics remained impeccably judged throughout.
If there was a reservation, it was about the reliance on rubato playing and a tendency to begin pieces with relatively freely improvised introductions. For someone whose playing is as cliche-free as Laubrock's, this has the potential to become a cliche in itself.
But that's a quibble; overall, the concert produced some beautiful, aggression-free music that held the interest to the end.
• Touring till Feb 17
To Have & To Hold
Old Museum, Belfast
Jane Coyle
The fluctuating value of life lies at the heart of Fergal McElherron's debut play, conceived as a promenade installation by Kabosh's new artistic director Paula McFetridge.
Three 20-minute pieces span generations and cultures, from the heady imagery of orthodox Catholicism enshrouding a deathbed to the sickening, thrill-a-minute celebrity cult thriving on the worldwide web.
Kabosh is always on the look-out for new ways and new environments in which to tell stories and, in navigating the galleries, back stairs and utility areas of the Old Museum, one cannot but catch distinct echoes of convictions, Tinderbox's epic triumph in 2000 - of which McFetridge was artistic director.
The audience is divided into three groups, following one another from one playlet to the next. Thus the viewing sequence varies from one group to the next, implying that there is no laid-down ritual through which these desperate and despairing lives should be glimpsed.
Martin McCann and Bernadette Brown appear less than entirely comfortable as Dover and Alan, a brother and sister plotting five minutes of fame and subsequent fortune via rape, bulimia, self-harm, incest, abuse and death on their own web page.
Andy Moore is Attis, a young man racked with guilt at the death of his girlfriend (Claire Lamont on video) during a pregnancy, deliberately contrived by him. He records his suicide note for her family on a webcam.
Stella McCusker and Lalor Roddy register as all too real in their portrayals of Clodagh, a dying mother, and Sam, the loving son who cared for her, and whose choking grief is assuaged by a final act of grotesque devotion.
It all makes for a strangely disturbing evening, whose visual and physical presentation and lingering subtext go some way towards compensating for a script which rarely rises above the ordinary.
• Runs until Feb 16
Roe, Cleary, Quinn
NCH John Field Room, Dublin
Andrew Johnstone
Beethoven - Trio in E flat Op 38. Rota - Trio.
Clarinettist Paul Roe, cellist Annette Cleary and pianist Rachel Quinn made up the unusual chamber music threesome called for by Beethoven's arrangement of his own Septet Op 20.
Conceived for the even more novel combination of three solo winds and four solo strings, this genial and abundantly melodic music both loses and gains in its adaptation for smaller forces. Without a horn to play them, the vigorous hunting motifs miss some of their natural savour, yet the piano brings a fresh aspect to the glitzier passages originally meant for a virtuoso violinist.
A calm presence at the keyboard, Quinn made light work of these showy episodes, and left just the right sounding-room for her collaborators. Cleary was a dynamo of generous expression and sprightly accentuation, while Roe capped the ensemble with suave and wistful melody-making.
Beethoven's six-movement work quickly won an inexorable popularity that he eventually grew to despise. But one of his successors in the genre of the clarinet trio, Oscar-winning Italian composer Nino Rota, would hardly have felt any such resentment. It was around the time that he was working on the score for The Godfather Part II, for which he earned an Academy Award, that Rota composed his Trio.
As you'd expect, it's a polished, moody and sophisticated little piece. Though the gallop-like finale bears a more than superficial resemblance to Ibert's Divertissement, it made for a fitting conclusion to a concert of chamber music at its most approachable and entertaining.
