A tribute to Margaret Burke Sheridan and Erik Friedlander in today's reviews.
A Tribute to Margaret Burke Sheridan, NCH John Field Room, Dublin
THE IRISH soprano Margaret Burke Sheridan (1889-1958) was fondly remembered before a packed house at the John Field Room of the National Concert Hall on Wednesday night.
Although she lived into her late 60s, the Mayo soprano's operatic career amounted to less than two decades. In that time, however, she won the personal approbation of Puccini and sang in the first complete electrical recording of his Madama Butterfly, worked with the great dictatorial conductor Arturo Toscanini at La Scala in Milan, and created the roles of Candida in Respighi's Belfagor (her selection for the role was reported in Time magazine) and Anna Maria in I Compagnacci by the little-known Primo Riccitelli.
Her career was largely confined to theatres in Italy and London (Covent Garden), and after her retirement from the stage in 1932 , she played out in Dublin the larger-than-life role of a prima donna with an illustrious past.
The singer's current friends do her no service by making exaggerated claims about her prominence, as her biographer Anne Chambers does in the printed programme for Wednesday's concert, declaring her to be one of "only three Irish people" who were "well known outside Ireland" in the 1920s, placing her in the company of Eamon de Valera and John McCormack, but blithely ignoring the likes of William Butler Yeats and George Bernard Shaw, who became Nobel laureates during that decade. And the Cork tenor John O'Sullivan had a distinguished (and longer) career at the Paris Opéra, as well as singing in Covent Garden, Chicago and La Scala (the title role in Otello in 1924).
But Sheridan's life and art are worth cherishing. Her singing as captured on disc had an unforced emotional directness (Wednesday's celebration began with her recording of the Ave Maria from Verdi's Otello), and Veronica Dunne, now in her 80s, movingly recalled her personal kindness and artistic generosity to a younger generation.
Bill Golding presided over an evening where his contributions included singing - he joined Veronica Dunne with Jeannie Reddin at the piano in Mozart's La ci darem la mano. And singers of two generations, sopranos Suzanne Murphy and Celine Byrne, offered touching samplings of the songs and arias that Sheridan had once made her own. - MICHAEL DERVAN
Erik Friedlander, The Sugar Club, Ray Comiskey
TO CALL Erik Friedlander's astonishing solo cello concert a virtuoso exhibition would be only partly accurate. A virtuoso? Clearly. But an exhibition? That is hardly the way to describe a performance in which, in the first set in particular, there was a sense of someone straining the bounds of the possible on the instrument in pursuit of a musical equivalent of impressionism.
And achieving it. In what was clearly a well-prepared and structured programme, he used the first half to evoke his childhood travels across America with his father, the celebrated photographer, Lee Friedlander, and his family. Playing pizzicato (replete at times with some gripping, up-tempo double-stopping) even more often than arco, he conjured up musically a vanishing rural time against a projected backdrop of his father's evocative pictures. Pieces like Tough Guy and Here Comes The Mad Woman spoke of encounters on the road. But others, like Road Weary, King Rig, the brief Cold Chicken, Yakima, the pastoral Rusting In Honeysuckle, Dream Song and Airstream Envy (about a swankier mobile home than their own) reinforced the visuals and his commentary.
Throughout, the changes of register and acutely sensitive dynamics, and the mix of dissonance and lyrical delicacy, were almost graphic in their impact.
Only one piece in the first set came from another source, when he gave a bravura performance and improvisation on Arthur Blythe's near-Eastern composition, Lower Nile.
A shorter second set, devoted to the music from John Zorn's Masada Book 2, The Book of Angels, offered a more expressionist side of this great musician's art. Drawn from Friedlander's solo cello album, Volac, the pieces provided some of the most moving and arresting playing of a memorable concert. Particularly striking were the opening three pieces, which, if I have identified them correctly, were Harhazial, a gloriously tender Rachsel, and a dazzling mix of arco and pizzicato playing on the uptempo Zumiel.
One measure of the impact of this remarkable musician is the fact that, although Friedlander was on-stage for over an hour and a half, it felt like less than half that time. He must come back here again.
