"Genre-hopping" was how Kate McGarry described a first set that contained everything from Joni Mitchell and Paul Simon to Brazilian music, standards from the Great American Songbook, some Scots-Irish material (I think) and some of her own originals.
Sympathetically backed for that set only by her partner, guitarist Keith Ganz, she showed what a capable singer she is, even in such an exposed setting.
With her rich voice, spot-on intonation and near-perfect diction, she can carry off some pieces extremely well; both Joni Mitchell's Chelsea Morning and Paul Simon's American Tune worked beautifully, especially the latter, a memorable performance of a memorable song. And the Brazilian No Wonder, including some crisp unison voice and guitar, was delightful.
But the two Old World pieces, Rocking the Cradle and Heather on the Hill, were frankly unconvincing, and the standards, The Second Time Around and Nobody Else But Me, had their impact diluted by an occasional tendency to over-elaborate on the melodic line at the expense of the meaning of the lyrics.
They were joined for the second set by bassist Dave Redmond and drummer Seán Carpio, who fitted superbly into music they had encountered only at rehearsal a few hours previously. With the emphasis more on jazz, the standards worked particularly well, notably It Might As Well Be Spring, which emerged refreshed from a sensitively recast line, and a witty, suggestive Whatever Lola Wants. The quartet grooved on a spiritual Soon I Will Be Done, and a fine McGarry original, Goin' In, and the concert closed with a spectacular Joga by Bjork.
It was all rapturously received, and deservedly so. McGarry doesn't have the lived-in voice to grab the audience the way jazz singers such as Billie Holiday, Nancy King or the late, great folk singer Karen Dalton would, and/or the intimacy of someone such as Rene Marie. But she is a fine singer, extremely good at what she does, adept at making friends with an audience and projecting her evident enjoyment in the process. - Ray Comiskey
My Chemical Romance - RDS Simmonscourt, Dublin
Over the past few years, American rock band My Chemical Romance (MCR) have slowly been aiming for their personal tipping point, something that was well and truly achieved last year with the release of the quite exceptional concept album, The Black Parade.
Part home-alone childhood reminiscence, distressed, depressed missive on encroaching death and treatise on the nature of parental control and love, the album's musical thrust is a dynamic mixture of commercial rock (as traditional and heroically streamlined as Queen, Def Leppard and Coldplay), T. Rex, Weill, Brecht, hints of jazz and blues, and whatever you're having yourself.
It's a heady and wholly successful blend, topped off with such a theatrical flourish it makes Rufus Wainwright look like Chuck Norris. The man behind such a thrilling rush of a concoction is Gerard Way, an often misunderstood combination of Montgomery Clift, Billy Graham and goth rock demi-god.
Way (as well as the remainder of the unfeasibly skinny band) was this and more at the barn-like Simmonscourt, surely the worst large venue in the country.
The show is sectioned into two: the first half was MCR alter-ego group Black Parade, who played the latest album from start to finish. The second half was MCR proper, who performed selections from their back catalogue. If the older material sounded rough around the edges (without ever losing sight of accessibility), the newer songs came across as fine-tuned examples of cracking on-point rock. It helped that the show was soaked in mock/shock theatrics; Way's entrance referenced Alice Cooper's heyday, while throughout, the venue was strafed and littered with highly effective show-stopping lights, bells and whistles.
It would have amounted to a bunch of shallow and hollow cliches if the music was archetypal one-note metal, yet MCR are anything but ordinary. Here is a band courageous enough to court the big time while still assiduously maintaining a most singular, exciting and unnerving streak. - Tony Clayton-Lea
Isabelle O'Connell (piano) - Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin
Ligeti - Musica ricercata. Seóirse Bodley - The Tightrope Walker Presents a Rose. John Buckley - The Cloths of Heaven. Beethoven - Sonata in A flat Op 110.
Dublin-born pianist Isabelle O'Connell, who is now forging a successful solo and chamber-music career in the United States, presented a thoughtful programme that framed character pieces by two living Irish composers with substantial works by two continental giants.
Pithily juxtaposing overtly Celtic melody with atonal expressionism, Seóirse Bodley's epigrammatic The Tightrope Walker Presents a Rose (1979) is an intriguing microcosm of the diverse dialects of Irish music today.
In contrast, and in spite of its indebtedness to Yeats's celebrated poem, John Buckley's more extended prelude The Cloths of Heaven says but a little, yet says it eloquently in a polished, European accent.
Both stylistically and spiritually, Ligeti's early and cunningly designed Musica ricercata may seem worlds apart from Beethoven's late and improvisatory Sonata Op 110. Each work, however, culminates in the time-honoured vehicle of absolute music, a fugue.
The venue's bathroom-like reverberation was better suited to the layered polyphony of Ligeti than to the elaborative counterpoint of Beethoven, and it put a washy finish on much of the generously pedalled passagework.
With both composers, O'Connell's approach could have admitted a certain cooler detachment. Yet the pervading brightness and buoyancy of her playing drew the two Irish items vividly off the page. - Andrew Johnstone
ICO/Marwood - NCH, Dublin
Brett Dean - Short Stories. Schoenberg - Verklaerte Nacht. Mendelssohn - Octet.
Australian composer and viola-player Brett Dean (a one-time member of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra) looked like the odd man out in the Irish Chamber Orchestra's (ICO) recent tour, directed from the violin by artistic director Anthony Marwood.
He's a lot less well-known than either Schoenberg or Mendelssohn, and in the context of the ICO's programme he was actually the oldest of the three composers, being in his mid-forties when his Short Stories was premiered by the Australian Chamber Orchestra in 2005.
Schoenberg was 25 when he wrote his erotically-charged Verklaerte Nacht (Transfigured Night) in 1899, and Mendelssohn a mere 16 when he completed his dazzling Octet in 1825.
The juxtaposition of the Dean and Schoenberg worked a treat, with the orchestra opting for the unusual ploy of playing the two works without a break. Dean's five-movement work offers a sequence of what you might call mood slices, and exploits an up-to-date panoply of sophisticated string-writing techniques. The range is so wide, in fact, and the textures so complex that the contrapuntal intricacies of the Schoenberg, which can often sound dense in performance, came to seem effortlessly clear and lucid by comparison.
The lucidity, of course, was not entirely due to the pairing of the two pieces. Anthony Marwood's ear for refined sonorities, and his players' facility in delivering them, ensured a luminous clarity in the performance of the Schoenberg. The playing seemed to have the best of both worlds - the flexibility of chamber music (Schoenberg originally wrote the piece for string sextet and later arranged it for string orchestra), as well as the extra tonal range and weight of a small orchestra.
Mendelssohn made clear that he had pseudo-orchestral ambitions for his Octet, a piece, he explained, which was to be played "by all the instruments in the style of a symphonic orchestra". The ICO, which has been making rather too many forays into orchestral arrangements of chamber works, this time played one to a part, without any upsizing.
The National Concert Hall is not really a suitable space for an octet to make a genuinely orchestral impression. The most common way for the work to be heard - the pairing of two established string quartets - usually results in playing of greater grunt than the ICO offered on this occasion. Maybe all that was needed was a re-ordering of the programme.
If the Mendelssohn had been played in the first half, perhaps the Schoenberg would have, so to speak, stolen none of its thunder. - Michael Dervan
