Critics from The Irish Timesreview the latest from the world of the arts

Galway Early Music Festival
Galway Athenry

The 13th Galway Early Music Festival, held at the weekend, involved an amount of breaking out. And, no, I'm not talking about leather outfits and exposed flesh, as I didn't actually get to hear Friday's concert by Canada's intentionally "bizarre and unnatural" baroque ensemble, I Furiosi.

The Galway festival has mostly concentrated on the earlier centuries of what's called "early music," while the early music festival up the West coast in Sligo has gravitated in the opposite direction, to the point of adopting a new and more specialised identity as the Sligo Festival of Baroque Music.

This year, however, Galway effectively leap-frogged over Sligo and landed in the 21st century, providing themselves with the rare opportunity of including something for which they could actually have the composer present in the audience. The composer was an Englishman, Tarik O'Regan, and the work was his two-year-old Scattered Rhymes, a choral work which sets texts by Petrarch and 14th-century English writers, not successively, but simultaneously, over three movements.

The piece, which was originally written as a companion piece for Machaut's Mess de Notre Dame, pairs a chorus with a determinedly virtuoso vocal quartet, in a way that combines something of the sparkle of the sun on the sea with the strong surge of the currents that can flow below.

Conductor Mark Duley's handling of the piece with the Galway choir Cois Cladaigh and the visiting Orlando Quartet didn't always fall into sharp enough focus - the acoustic of St Nicholas Collegiate Church can blur the edges of most music-making - but both the broader patterns and the rhythmic élan communicated well.

Sadly, the festival organisers provided no words of the sung texts for this or any of the other pieces on the evening's programme. The programme was titled The Call of the Phoenix and stranded plainchant and music from 15th-century England through the 15th- century Caput Mass, originally thought to have been by Dufay, but now attributed to an anonymous Englishman. Although the audience had turned up for an early music festival, the listeners reserved their most enthusiastic response for O'Regan, not for Scattered Rhymes, but for his Machaut-inspired Virelai: Douce dame jolie, which the Orlando Consort offered as an encore.

The festival's second break-out was to leave Galway city and head to Athenry for its closing concert on Sunday afternoon. The setting was a perfect, if chilly one for early music, a room in a 13th-century building, Athenry Castle.

The music was provided by the newly-formed group, Morisca - Pauline Graham (soprano), Laoise O'Brien (recorders), Francesco Turrisi (percussion), and Elisabeth Seitz (dulcimer). Their well-chosen programme, Ce fu en Mai, presented a sequence of four groups of songs and dances from the middle ages, the singing plaintively straight, the players ringing the full range of changes in the combinations of instrumental colours. The venue may have been cold, but the music-making was often hot.
MICHAEL DERVAN

Norma
National Concert Hall

For any soprano, the role of Norma is not just an Everest to scale, but a minefield to traverse. In Lyric Opera's concert performance of Bellini's masterpiece at the NCH, Cara O'Sullivan triumphed on both counts. Drawing on her considerable armoury of vocal and dramatic skills to present a credible portrait of the fraught priestess, she phrased the gentle music exquisitely, was fiery but always womanly in declamation, and encompassed the coloratura requirements with aplomb.

If a few high notes were fully voiced rather than floated, it was a minor transgression amid a plethora of vocal delights.

Alongside her, Linda Lee was an incisive and securely sung Adelgisa, although her timbral richness hardly suggested the younger priestess's vulnerability.

In their two great scenes together, episodes in which the voices blended easily, the sopranos presented opulent vocal confrontations of almost gladiatorial scale. It was all quite hair-raising.

American tenor Joseph Wolverton was a lightweight Pollione, but he coped admirably with the florid demands and offered some fine lyrical singing in his Act II duet with Norma and in the moving finale.

Russian bass Stanislav Shvets had all the required gravitas and tonal security for the role of Norma's father Oroveso. The choral singing was firm and well tuned. The men, all 16 of them, were particularly impressive.

Fergus Sheil, conducting a small but capable band in Tony Burke's reduced orchestrations, presided over an evening of highest quality music making with energy, imagination and flexibility.

His speeds were generally on the fast side, but he never harried his singers and he was, throughout, fully immersed in the work's emotional swings and roundabouts. I don't often play the chauvinistic card, but it really is time this fine young Irish musician was given a chance to prove his worth by one of our opera companies.
JOHN ALLEN

McGeown, Camerata Ireland/Douglas
Castletown House, Celbridge

Mozart Piano Concerto in E flat K449; David Morris The Magnificent Peak; Tchaikovsky Serenade for Strings.

Barry Douglas's Camerata Ireland mustered an 18-strong string band to open the ensemble's first series of Castletown Concerts. Two further concerts are scheduled at the prestigious Palladian venue in August and September respectively.

Filled with an audience of 120 at one end and a chamber orchestra at the other, Castletown's gallery room felt spacious enough until the moment the music started. It was as if the players themselves were taken aback by the acoustic congestion.

The piano too sounded boomy in Mozart's Concerto No 14 K449. Its top lid had been completely removed to allow Douglas, sitting with his back to the audience, to double as soloist and conductor.

The question was much less whether this arrangement cramped Douglas's style than whether it really helped the orchestra's. In the solo-tutti interplay, it was to the clarity and profusion of ideas emanating via the keyboard that they seemed most responsive.

With Tchaikovsky's Serenade for Strings, Douglas's approach was to let the music take its own entrancing course. This yielded involved and expressive playing, but inevitably also led to some frayed coordination.

A sense of frozen concentration tended to elude the rhetorically important silences, while the emotional curves of the Elegie third movement particularly called for more strategy.

Given that Mozart's option of dispensing with the concerto's wind parts had been taken, the inclusion of an item with solo flute was especially welcome. The advocacy of flautist Eimear McGeown made it all the more so.

The Magnificent Peak by Northern Ireland-based composer David Morris might be described as a continuum of free variations from which the theme, An Speic Seoigheach, ultimately emerges.

McGeown, for whose wide-ranging talents this single-movement piece was written, made its loose agenda of contemporary and traditional styles surprisingly persuasive.
ANDREW JOHNSTONE