Michael Dervanreviews McDonough and the RTÉCOat the RDS in Dublin while Jane Coylesaw The Canterbury Talesat the Old Museum Arts Centre in Belfast

McDonough,
RTÉCO/Houlihan RDS,
Dublin

Haydn - Symphony No 49 (La Passione). Bach - Suite No 2.
CPE Bach - Flute Concerto in G Wq169. Mozart - Symphony No 35 (Haffner)

The RTÉ Concert Orchestra has long been an unpredictable force in the music of the 18th century.

Over the years, it has given memorable performances under guest conductors specialising in this area of repertoire, most notably, in my experience, in partnership with Harry Christophers and Nicholas Kraemer, and has also hit the heights under Celso Antunes and Laurent Wagner.

Robert Houlihan's programme at the RDS offered music written roughly over four decades, from about 1740 to 1780, by four of the greatest names of the time, Bach, Haydn and Mozart, all at their orchestral peak, and a rarely heard flute concerto by Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach.

The performances, however, were on the rough side of robust. Haydn's Symphony No 49, nicknamed La Passione,shows the composer in his darkest, fiercest mode, a manner that was not well served by the frequent tentativeness of expression in the orchestra's playing.

Both Johann Sebastian Bach's Suite in B minor for solo flute and strings and Carl Phillip Emanuel's Flute Concerto in G were delivered with technical aplomb by Emer McDonough.

Her musical success was greatest in the familiar suite, which she happily concluded without the "race against time" effect favoured by James Galway.

The music-making in the concerto seemed targeted on integrating the composer's oddities of manner into a smooth, commonsensical presentation rather than celebrating them for the delightful indulgences of fantasy that they actually are.

The effect was rather like trying to trim the excesses of Gargantua and Pantagruel or tidy up the loose ends in Tristram Shandy.

The heartiest but also least well-adjusted playing was reserved for Mozart's HaffnerSymphony, where a familiar litany of solecisms of balance, ensemble and intonation were knitted into the evening's most stirring performance.

Michael Dervan

The Canterbury Tales,
Old Museum Arts Centre, Belfast

"Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote the droghte of March hath pierced to the roote . . ." intones the resurrected Geoffrey Chaucer in the final moments of Martin Riley's adaptation of The Canterbury Tales.

It is a fleeting reminder of the beautiful poetry that brought to life a colourful band of pilgrims, heading for the great Christian shrine of Canterbury in the late 1300s, armed with raunchy, hot-blooded tales of love and lust in forest, farmyard, church and court. But Martin Riley consciously sacrifices the former for the latter in his quest to expose the fun and accessibility beneath the medieval text.

It is these qualities that attracted the Bruiser Theatre Company's artistic director, Lisa May, to the piece, which hinges on the kind of high-energy, multi-role physical theatre that is the company's hallmark.

In the prologue, Chaucer himself is slipped an elixir of eternal life and installed in a front-row seat, from where he can revel in the antics of four time-travelling troubadours.

Riley mixes thoroughly modern language with audience participation and popular music in his retelling of the tales of the miller, the pardoner, the nun's priest and the wife of Bath.

There is a Pythonesque air about some of the set pieces, notably the pompous, chauvinist Sir Codsbrain, cantering around the countryside in search of the answer to an apparently silly question. Others are just plain daft, performed with a tad too much face-pulling and raspberry-blowing.

But the talented cast - Matt McArdle, Sarah Lyle, Patrick J O'Reilly and Niamh Shaw - work their socks off in capturing Chaucer's salty humour and searching subtexts.

A sharper sense of historical and social perspective would help put the jolly japes into context, but that didn't stop the audience from laughing heartily from beginning to end at an entertainment they might otherwise have snoozed through.

Runs until March 27th, then goes on tour

Jane Coyle