Irish Timeswriters review a selection of recent events.
Conor Linehan (piano)
NCH John Field Room, Dublin
Mozart – Sonata in A minor K310. Brahms – Fantasias Op 116. Ravel – Sonatine. Barber – Excursions. Prokofiev – Sonata No 3.
Conor Linehan’s piano recital at the NCH John Field Room on Thursday was both a rewarding and a frustrating experience. Linehan is an intelligent and musicianly performer, and his solo programmes typically explore the works of core composers in a way that avoids both cliche and populism.
On Thursday he offered a sequence of blue-chip Mozart, Brahms, Ravel and Prokofiev, and added a rarity by Samuel Barber, the four Excursions, which present popular Americana with an intriguing variety of clever twists.
Some of the evening’s best moments came at the heart of Brahms’s Op. 116 Fantasias, when the music was at its most touchingly ruminative, and in the flexible swing of Barber’s blues movement, a movement where compositional artifice will fox any performer who prioritises the actual notes over essential bluesiness, a trap Linehan completely avoided.
He delighted, too, in the snappy, clappy rhythms of the final Excursionand responded sensitively to the contours of Ravel's Sonatine. The evening's downside was to be felt elsewhere, in the apparent discrepancies between intention and delivery.
There was a want of polish which resulted, for instance, in an excessively aggressive presentation of the outer movements of Mozart's Sonata in A minor (with over-projected accompanimental figuration contributing a lot to the problem), and a narrowing of dynamic range in the more stressful passages in Brahms's Op. 116 Fantasias and Prokofiev's Third Sonata. There was also a series of memory glitches which presented not only momentary gaps (from which the recovery was always expert) but also a transposition of musical material in, of all places, the bluesy Barber Excursion.
The evening's frustration stemmed from the fact that, even when the playing became that bit too generalised, the musicianly intentions were discernible enough for one to hanker after performances that could muster that extra bit of finesse. Michael Dervan
The Very Best of Gilbert Sullivan
NCH, Dublin
Four of Gilbert and Sullivan's comic operas, HMS Pinafore, The Pirates of Penzance, The Mikado and The Gondoliers, were represented in this concert at the NCH. David Brophy, who conducted the RTÉCO in sparkling performances of three overtures, also directed bright and breezy accounts of some of the dances from Pineapple Poll, the John Cranko ballet so ingeniously arranged from Sullivan's scores by Charles Mackerras. Here, and throughout the evening, the RTÉCO was in top form, especially in the woodwind department.
None of the four operas offers duets for a soprano/baritone combination, so soloists Sylvia O'Brien and Brendan Collins were heard together only in When the foeman bares his steel, the stirring Act II ensemble from The Pirates. I felt that a chance was missed by not including Sir Joseph Porter's entrance scene from HMS Pinafore, an episode that would also have embraced the full chorus and both soloists.
O'Brien was in good voice, a few under-pitched notes apart, and soared effortlessly in Josephine's two dramatic showpieces as well as in Elsie Maynard's poignant aria from The Yeomen. She was somewhat mannered in Yum-Yum's self-admiring song about the sun and the moon, but she brought the house down with her outrageously tongue- in-cheek take-off of every coloratura diva you can think of in Mabel's Poor wand'ring one.
Brendan Collins, whom we usually hear in more serious fare, displayed a wickedly comic side to his art as the ridiculous “humane” Mikado, the pompous Capt Corcoran and the lugubrious Police Sergeant. He also pared down his warm operatic baritone to deliver clearly articulated renderings of a couple of patter songs.
The chorus of the Glasnevin Musical Society sang enthusiastically.
The ladies sang sweetly, but they were upstaged in vocal presence by the men, who had the lion's share of the work. John Allen
Chronicles of Long Kesh
Waterfront Hall, Belfast
We've had The History of the Troubles – the Comedy. Next comes Long Kesh – the Musical, aka Chronicles of Long Kesh, Martin Lynch's new play, which he directs for Green Shoot Productions. It is over eight years since the last prisoners walked out of the bleak confines of HMP the Maze, leaving behind thousands of unquiet ghosts and ineradicable memories.
As the scars slowly start to heal, writers, artists and film-makers are creating their interpretations of the hellhole that festered away in the quick of Northern society for so long.
Startling statistics show that in the early 1980s, around one in 10 of the population either worked or were imprisoned in the Maze or had a close family member locked up there.
Now Lynch judges that the time is right to put on stage the fictionalised experiences of some of those people who shared their stories with him.
In this brisk gallop through the history of Long Kesh – “the long meadow” – he attempts, with varying degrees of success, to fuse a tricky combination of music, comedy, social comment, political analysis and realism. The piece is structured around a series of sketches, narrated by Billy Clarke’s bewildered prison officer Freddie Gillespie and focused on the activities of a surreal bunch of republican and loyalist inmates.
Led by Marty Maguire’s hypnotic Oscar and Chris Corrigan’s intense Eamon, they evolve from socially alienated young internees into hardened political prisoners.
Lynch does not shy away from showing the depths to which the human spirit frequently sank in those dark days, but uses the music of the time – in some terrific a cappellaperformances – to pull back from the brink, a device which sometimes dilutes the emotional impact.
After the interval, the musical and dramatic momentum builds and the writer, who publicly states that he did not support the hunger strikes, is at his most persuasive in the heated internal debates about who would have the moral courage to turn away or add his name to the list. Until Jan 31. Jane Coyle
