Irish Timeswriters review Lionel Richieat the Point in Dublin, My Luminariesat Crawdaddy in Dublin and Romain Descharmesat the National Concert Hall in Dublin .
Lionel Richie, Point, Dublin
Lionel Richie has aged about 45 minutes since those nights in the early 1980s when this writer sneaked downstairs after bedtime to watch him, on the then-nascent MTV, mooching around after the blind pottery student in that video for Hello.
Tonight, some 20-odd years later, he is resplendent, and that is the only word that is appropriate, in black velvet tuxedo trousers, a series of billowing black satin dress shirts (he changes into a fresh one when they become too sweaty), a white bow tie, left rakishly undone and draped around his flicked-up collar and plunging neckline, and a smile as big as the Ritz.
There are several ways to be a living legend, to carry on with a career when your myth-making years may be decades behind you but, man, they were some good years. One is to do a Johnny Cash, all quiet artistry and authenticity. Another is to be Lionel Richie, a grinning and ageless ringmaster of a hellsapoppin' soul-rock-lite circus-style revue. After all, subtlety would only get kicked around like an errant handbag when you're busy dancing on the ceiling.
So the evening is a slightly schmaltzy mix of put-your-hands-in-the-air 1980s nostalgia (All Night Long) and smooch-your-wife, er, 1980s nostalgia (Endless Love, Say You, Say Me), with Richie himself suavely note-perfect and in rabble-rousing motion throughout.
His band might be over-rehearsed, with every jokey aside and showstopping stage antic choreographed, leaving almost no room for spontaneity, but they go for it like gangbusters. "I can tell that pandemonium is about to break out," Richie booms repeatedly between high-energy, if still strangely tame and sexless versions of Running With The Night and The Commodores' hit Brick House, even though this audience is predominantly female, over 45 and unfailingly polite, and pandemonium is indeed the last thing that is about to break out.
Midway through the set, he dismisses his band for one number and sits at a piano to play the old Commodores' weepie Still.
Stripped of the ability to bound around and cheerlead, he just plays, and, unexpectedly, magic happens: the song takes on the lonesome gravity of a Jimmy Webb ballad, all regret and longing, Richie's voice smooth and savoury as chocolate. And it's then that you realise that, wow, the ringmaster is a legend. Maybe, in another 20 years, he'll do a Johnny Cash.- Kim V Porcelli
My Luminaries, Crawdaddy, Dublin
My Luminaries might be one of the more recent British rock bands to rear their heads, but they leave the surplus crop of this surging genre in the shade.
The band hail from Reading and Manchester, and have learned plenty from some of the better Brit rock bands currently on tour, but there is a slightly more vintage quality to much of the music, that throws up inevitable touches of David Bowie and The Clash, with a healthy dose of Americana.
The songs are well-crafted and intelligent, with guitar hooks that strafe and jab at your ears, luring you in with their honed hooks and edgy enthusiasm. Live, they add a more sprawling, organic element that shows the tightness of the playing on the forthcoming single, The Outsider Steps Inside, is no studio artifice.
As is often the case with young bands, My Luminaries don't have a massive back catalogue to draw on, which limits the set somewhat. The work hard on stage; they don't move effortlessly within the tracks, riffing off of each other with the non-chalance of a more tour-seasoned group, but all of this amounts to barely a complaint.
The band play with a rawness and enthusiasm that is refreshing and without arrogance. The attack each song with an infectious vigour, and when they alight upon their more well-known tracks, there is an impetuous to the playing that lifts the room.
Petrol Station Union Jacks turns heads, but the band have end-loaded the too-brief set, and when Jumping the Great White swaggers its way into the room, looking and sounding for all the world like the earliest and perhaps strongest contender for this summer's best rock song, the stage and audience erupt. The playing kicks up a notch and the crowd have smiles all round as The Outsider Steps Inside keeps the pressure up.
On stage, much like their music, the band have bags of guile and charm. Lead singer James Ewers apologises for being late as the band missed their flight from England, but promises it was the first time it happened, only for bass player Saul Perryman to quip that it was only the second flight he's ever been on. On the evidence here, it won't be long before My Luminaries are jumping from flight to flight to play to rapturous crowds throughout Europe and beyond. - Laurence Mackin
Romain Descharmes, National Concert Hall, Dublin
Ravel - Sonatine, Gaspard de la Nuit. Brahms - Sonata in F minor Op 5. Frederic Rzewski - Winnsboro Cotton Mill Blues
The days when you could routinely expect international music competitions to produce great winners are long gone. Competitions are now a dime a dozen and although a first prize is a sure career boost, even the winners of major competitions can struggle to establish the kind of reputation they could once have almost taken for granted. Winning at Leeds, Warsaw or Moscow is no longer the guarantee of recognition among music-lovers that it would have been 20 or 30 years ago.
The competition performances of Romain Descharmes, the French winner of the 2006 AXA Dublin International Piano Competition, seemed very much in the current competition-winner mould: technically safe if not outstanding, musically uncontentious, reliable rather than inspirational.
He chose an unusual programme for his post-competition Dublin debut. Ravel had served him well during the competition, including the finals, so the return programme included a double helping of the French composer.
After the lightness of Ravel's Sonatine, the audience was catapulted into a succession of virtuoso works, the young Brahms's often stormy F minor Sonata followed by the nightmarish difficulties of Ravel's Gaspard de la Nuit, leading on to Frederic Rzewski's intentionally oppressive Winnsboro Cotton Mill Blues of 1979.
Descharmes is not the kind of player to dispatch such a demanding programme with effortless-seeming ease. His musicianship is sound and his taste is good. It was at all times possible to work out where he wanted to be headed and why.
But the delivery didn't always hit the spot. There was a too-consistent tendency for climaxes to run out of steam, and for more reflective passages to lose momentum.
The progress of what had turned into an altogether too ordinary-sounding recital was interrupted by the pianist's short spoken introduction to the Rzewski, and the performance that followed changed the temperature considerably.
Rzewski's evocation of pulsating factory rhythms, and the tumult of his relentless piling-up of sonorities (involving fingers, hands, arms and elbows), were all handled with patient, aptly motoric skill.
More than anything else in the evening, the moody pictorialism of this politically motivated piece made a distinctive and powerful impression. - Michael Dervan
