Irish Timeswriters review Chris Woodat Whelan's Dublin; Morgan, Pennant, Papapetropoulosat the Huge Lane gallery, Dublin; and Finghin Collinsat Airfield House, Dublin
Chris Wood at Whelan's, Dublin
The pleasure of a work in progress. That's what Chris Wood's music is. He revels in its changing shapes and shades; he studies its evolution, and cajoles it into corners and alleyways - and most of all, he savours music's ability to criss-cross through time, hauling the past into the present, and vice versa, sometimes to startling effect.
There's no artifice in what he does. When he tackles The Cottager's Reply, just one man and his guitar standing four square behind a mic, he drills deep into the dark underbelly that routs people from their land, supplanting them with interlopers in pursuit of a storybook existence in the country - at weekends.
Wood's elegance is stitched neatly in between his words and music. What could so easily have been a tale of blind parental pride mutates into a sharp-edged snapshot of childhood in all its complexity in Hard. Working best with music's minor chords, his music is at times medieval in tone, a haughty, alien sound that hits the eardrums like nothing else: challenging now, irking then, and almost always refusing to follow tired convention.
His stark confidence as a solo performer surprises. His delivery of circuitous tales challenges the punter's ever-decreasing attention span to sit up and take note.
But his sheer pleasure in mining the depths of a song is precisely what lures the listener in. Wood had his audience rapt with multifarious meandering tales that skirt past Thomas A Beckett (Lord Bateman), the English folk tradition of mumming (Christmas Champions), and a surprisingly optimistic tale of the triumph of the spirit (Walk this World). He revels in the contrariness of his "atheist spiritual", written in response to Jonathan Miller's television series, A Brief History of Disbelief, and casts a cold eye on the crusades to which so many blindly succumbed, so readily.
Punters leave his gig laden with tales of life's ordinariness that lodge deep within the cerebral cortex, to emerge at moments, hours, days and even months later. Wood casts himself as "forever the thinker on the brink of eureka" - but we all hanker after those insights that burrow beneath life's epidermis. Lucky are those who catch him on his first Irish solo tour: they'll garner much more than a mere night full of music - closer to a lifetime's worth. Siobhán Long
Triskel Arts Centre, Cork tonight and Airfield House, Dundrum, Thurs
Morgan, Pennant, Papapetropoulos at the Hugh Lane gallery, Dublin
Joe Cutler - (re)GAIA. Sally Beamish - The Seafarer. Telemann - Fantasia No 7 in E flat. Yannis Kyriakides - Snake Music
The advance publicity for this concert advertised a rather confusing mix. It featured not only a violinist and poet - a rare but regular-enough combination - but also traditional music from the Middle East, played upon the saz.
What's a saz? What was this concert to be about? In the end, happily, it was really about Belfast-born violinist Darragh Morgan. He performed three unaccompanied pieces, opening with the short (re)GAIA by Joe Cutler, who describes it as "an imaginary folk music" dating back to the prehistoric tales of Gaia, the Greek earth- goddess. Morgan exploited the venue's lingering resonance while calmly managing the piece's lengthy pedals and giving energetic voice to the short, dissonant motifs that propelled the music forward.
Less dissonant was The Seafarer by Sally Beamish, inspired by the poem of the same name that was found in a 10th-century codex at Exeter Cathedral. It's a meditation on the sea voyage as metaphor for the quest for eternal life. Morgan's playing was characterised by a sort of tranquil animation, from the opening contemplations to the folk-like two-voiced song at the end.
For a sharp, stylistic contrast his final piece was the short Fantasia No 7 in E flat by Telemann, for which he changed to a baroque bow. He is a versatile player, here applying the same intensity with which he energises contemporary music to these alternating slow and sprightly movements from the 18th century.
The programme was interspersed with readings by Welsh poet Richard Douglas Pennant, whose 2004 collection Old Stones - New Tales gave the concert its subtitle. His style is easy-going yet thought-provoking, and his selections provided fitting thematic segues to the musical items.
And the saz? It's the Turkish national instrument, a long-necked lute with a bulging pear-shaped body and three courses of strings. Following four poems laced with Middle-Eastern imagery, Greek lutenist Periklis Papapetropoulos gave a colourful, rhythmically driven performance of Snake Music - based on Balouchistan folk music from northern Iran - by Cypriot composer Yannis Kyriakides, a former pupil of Louis Andriessen. Michael Dungan
Finghin Collins at Airfield House, Dundrum
Handel - Suite No 5 in E. Haydn - Variations in F minor. Gerhard - Dances from Don Quixote. Mompou - Canciónes y Danzas No 3 and 4. Liszt - Sonata in B minor
Recitals in small venues on small grand pianos can be a trial to a performer. Modern training, and the prospect of playing concertos with large orchestras in large halls, have left many performers better prepared to address the needs of listeners in distant back rows than those seated much closer in small, intimate spaces.
Performing spaces don't come much smaller and more intimate than the domestic confines of Airfield House, and Finghin Collins's programme made no concessions to the size of piano or room. For most of the evening there was barely a ruffle in the playing to suggest the exercise was putting this talented performer under any particular strain.
If anything, the highly contrasted worlds of the first half of the evening - Handel's most famous keyboard suite, with the Harmonious Blacksmith Variations, Haydn's justly celebrated F minor Variations, and a rarely-heard 1947 set of dances from Catalan composer Roberto Gerhard's ballet Don Quixote - at times positively brimmed over with joie de vivre. There may have been a touch too much perkiness in the Handel, but the Haydn had the requisite, elaborately embellished gravity, and the ballet dances were at all times richly characterised.
In the second half Collins juxtaposed the work of another Catalan, Federico Mompou, a man who always chose to work on a miniature scale, with the grand and grandiose B minor Sonata of Liszt. Mompou is celebrated for a series of works entitled Canción y Danza, and Collins's playing of the third and fourth, dating from 1926 and 1928, proved more evocative in the singing than in the dancing.
The playing of the Liszt sonata was that of a young man, ardent and sometimes hot-heated, more apt to rush unexpectedly than to linger. Here also, there was some unusual fallibility of concentration or of finger, the outcome, perhaps, of trying to coax from the piano successive tumults of tone far greater than it was designed to yield.
The outcome was a performance that sounded more like a work-in-progress than a finished view. There was no loss of poise, however, and as an encore Collins straightaway treated the appreciative audience to a sensitively gentle account of Schumann's Romance in F sharp major. Michael Dervan
