Siobhán Long reviews Pierre Bensusan at the Seamus Ennis Cultural Centre and Lasairfhíona Ní Chonaola at Airfield House while Andrew Johnstonesaw the Carducci String Quartet at the NCH Peter Crawleywent to the Stiff Little Fingers in the Temple Bar Music Centre in Dublin

Lasairfhíona Ní Chonaola
Airfield House,
Dundrum

Airfield House's pastoral setting proved the ideal backdrop for one of Aran Island singer, Lasairfhíona Ní Chonaola's rare sorties to the capital.

Hers is a voice that startles the first-time listener with its stark simplicity. Ní Chonaola navigates a sure-footed pathway through some of the tradition's biggest songs, yet she rarely falls victim to the perilous chasms that have engulfed singers too awestruck by the inheritance embedded in each one.

That said, her evident nervousness was palpable throughout a swathe of her songs on Friday night. Her visceral reading of Bean Dubh An Ghleanna showed this was a singer who meant business. Bill Shanley's guitar accompaniment lent Lasairfhíona a beautifully judged counterpoint, ebbing and flowing, but never even dreaming of engulfing her naked vocals.

She tackled Tonnta Chonamara with an anxious breathiness that didn't quite do full justice to the song, and her decision to include Bean Pháidín so early in the set undermined the murderous deviance of the storyline, as she struggled to find comfort beneath the spotlight.

Had she postponed this deceptively playful but lethal tale of a woman scorned until later in her set, she might have eked much more of the flesh from its bones. Shortly after though, she loosed the ties that bound her, and lost herself in Grá Mo Chroí Mo Chúilín, buoyed possibly by hers and her father's contribution of a number of verses to a tale borrowed from the tradition. Lasairfhíona tackled another big song, Una Bhán with the requisite gravitas demanded of the song, and her reading of Cailleach An Airgead was equally confident, the melodrama of each set piece seemingly nothing more than a quotidian experience for this island inhabitant.

Interestingly, her take on the macaronic One Morning In June again revealed a certain buckling of her confidence as she struggled to recall the lyrics: a difficulty she never encountered when singing in her native Irish.

This was a genteel night of music that did much to shore up film maker Bob Quinn's thesis about the links between Celtic and African cultures.

Lasairfhíona Ní Chonaola's bare naked song lines whispered of influences that stretch well past the confines of Connacht, and her languorous repertoire hints at a singer with much more to reveal, as her confidence in live performance grows.

Siobhán Long

Carducci String Quartet
NCH, John Field Room, Dublin

Haydn - Quartet in D Op 50 No 6 (Frog).
Dvorák - Quartet in F Op 96 (American).
Though this was the shortest concert of their six-day Irish tour, it left no doubts as to why the dynamic young Carducci Quartet have garnered successes in so many recent international competitions. Their combination of technical rigour, penetrative musical insight and lively yet unified individualism is winning in every sense of the word.

Two of them Irish, two English, these proteges of the RTÉ Vanbrugh Quartet have all the makings of an ensemble-for-life. Now a pair of married couples, they've recently launched their own CD label with a debut disc of Haydn.

Their live performance of the last of his Op 50 quartets was unaffectedly elegant, with a deep sense of connectedness running beneath the first movement's scattered surface details.

Light sonorities, thoughtful phrasing and impeccably integrated timbres made this a reading of unusual freshness and appeal. The supposedly croaky musical onomatopoeia that originally suggested this piece's nickname of "Frog" might be rather lost on contemporary ears, but there could never be any mistaking the American flavour of Dvorák's Op 96 quartet.

In effortlessly capturing its simple joys and simple sorrows, the Carduccis did just what this loveable and unashamedly rustic music requires. With four artists so equally matched technically and temperamentally, to single out individual contributions would, perhaps, be invidious. But mention must be made of cellist Emma Denton's ravishing melodic playing at the close of Dvorák's brooding slow movement. The Carducci Quartet will return to Ireland in July and August for concerts in Co Cork and Kilkenny.

Andrew Johnstone

Pierre Bensusan
Seamus Ennis Cultural Centre,
the Naul

That elusive intersection between ethnic identity and technical wizardry is a crossroads at French solo guitarist, Pierre Bensusan loiters gracefully.

Despite the Seamus Ennis Centre's resistance to presenting their star performer on schedule (and dawdling with an over-extended interval to boot), Bensusan delivered a pitch perfect performance in a venue for which he expressed a genuine if surprising affection, being a long-time admirer of the great Naul piper whose memory the venue honours.

Bensusan's vocabulary is peppered with phrases that straddle the musical and the percussive, and he uses his guitar to articulate both with startling freshness.

Taking much of his opening repertoire from his latest (and tenth) CD, Altiplanos, Bensusan gently lured his punters into a world where the sky is not just a different hue, but an entirely different texture, and fulfils a different function too: instead of offering a roof on his world, it's simply a springboard to an entirely different plane where three chords and the truth simply don't cut it.

Demain, Des L'Aube, based on a poem by Victor Hugo, reveals Bensusan at his unearthly best: his vocals (now pillowy, then jagged) weaving in and out between his circuitous guitar lines, never yielding to the temptation of a lazy melody line, but still conjuring a world at a glorious remove from the grit and grime of daily life.

So Long Michael was languorous and highly structured at one and the same time, while Kadourimdou introduced a welcome dissonance to the mix. Later, Bensusan betrayed his impressive diplomatic expertise and paid fulsome tribute to Seamus Ennis with The Return From Fingal, although his decision to simply let it fade out hinted at an unfinished encounter rather than a muscular collision of musical forces.

With the entire audience on side, Bensusan broached one of his own seminal compositions, Wu Wei, its Chinese title urging the audience to "go with the flow", and that's precisely what they did, while Bensusan continued to stretch and bend his instrument in fittingly acrobatic shapes that would find few equals round these parts. Gloriously lateral thinking, Bensusan's inveterate pursuit of music's less navigated terrain is still a show-stopper - and resonate long after he sounded his final note.

Siobhán Long

Stiff Little Fingers
Temple Bar Music Centre,
Dublin

Tonight, Stiff Little Fingers will not be trading on nostalgia, Jake Burns tells a sold-out crowd, to considerable approval. But, this being the 30th anniversary of Northern Ireland's most influential punk band and their never-bettered debut album, Inflammable Material, Burns also assures us that there be "a huge portion of nostalgia" - to considerable approval.

Damned if you do, damned if you don't, such is the lot of punk as it enters middle age. A genre that once rallied to the cry "no future" never anticipated how it should relate to the past. But if Burns cannily sidesteps the matter, treating us to a none-too-shabby new song directed at the Bush-Blair axis called The Liars' Club, he cannot keep the tide of reminiscence at bay.

Before the forgettable Guitar & Drum, for instance, the tousle-haired gravel-voiced frontman goes off on a grumpy tirade against the X Factor, while indulging in misty-eyed reverie for late seventies "pop": when The Sex Pistols, The Clash and Elvis Costello reigned supreme. Actually, in 1977 David Soul, Boney M and Wings reigned supreme.

Anyone who introduces Suspect Device as "an old Northern Irish folk tune" can be forgiven for a little revisionist history though, particularly when the description isn't that far from the truth. Its blistering guitars and splenetic cynicism feel as fresh as ever, and, mining their debut album relentlessly (and playing it tighter than might be expected from the ninth configuration of the band), SLF prove that three decades have not made Inflammatory Material any less incendiary.

The pummelling Wasted Life, a slashing two-finger rebuke to paramilitarism, draws spumes of flung beer cups from a leather-intensive crowd. The anti-racist White Noise is so lyrically provocative (to those with an underdeveloped sense of irony) that it comes first with an explanation. I hate to fall prey to nostalgia, but I can't remember a time when right-on politics sounded so dangerous.

Time may have marched on, and genres of punk these days rarely come without a prefix, but a song like Alternative Ulster doesn't date. Whether its vision is now in reach, or forever deferred, these Stiff Little Fingers are still making some wonderful noise.

Peter Crawley