Plays until Saturday September(booking at 01-6082461) prior to tour
Olivier Messiaen Festival
Saturday night's organ recital by Naji Hakim at Christ Church Cathedral was a highlight of the Royal Irish Academy of Music's Messiaen festival. Hakim, who succeeded Messiaen after the composer's 62-year stint as organist of La Sainte-Trinite in Paris, ensured that the tone colour which so preoccupied Messiaen was the pre-eminent feature, in all its variety, in his performance of the 1935 cycle, La Nativite du Seigneur.
Given the international reputation for Messiaen of pianist Paul Crossley, who gave the festival's opening recital, it was interesting that he should be so roundly upstaged by the playing of Hugh Tinney. Both played from the early, Debussy-indebted Preludes (1929), and neither brooked any indulgence. Yet it was Tinney, in his Sunday lunchtime recital, who communicated relish where Crossley had adhered to a disinterested cool, fine for the music's undoubted cerebral depth but well short of the fuller picture offered by Tinney. The festival programme was disappointing overall, a loose assortment dominated by extracts. A commemorative festival could have been an opportunity to explore some of Messiaen's large-scale works in full, but just three of these were presented over the span of seven concerts. In this context, Saturday's lunchtime performance by Therese Fahy and Dearbhla Collins of the complete 1943 Visions de l'amen for two pianos was very welcome.
The Messiaen Festival ended on Monday with two recitals, the first a solo piano recital by Jean Dube at the RIAM, the second a performance of The Quartet for the End of Time at the National Gallery.
The young Jean Dube has a formidable technique and conveyed well the jarring contrast between the primitivism of the composer's emotions and the sophistication of the means used to express them. In "Par lui tout a ete fait" from Vingt regard sur l'enfant Jesus and in "Le Taquet rieur" from Catalogue d'oiseaux, he played the piano with a zest that made one realise that the instrument by nature belongs to the percussion family and that Messiaen took advantage of this relationship to produce work that makes Bartok sound less barbaric and almost refined. Of the sensuality that underlies the composer's work, there was little sign.
Dube followed those two pieces with three etudes by Ligeti which belonged, despite their modern sound, to a world made familiar by the keyboard works of J.S. Bach. Though the first etude was called "Desordre", it was its mastery of order that impressed, especially after Messiaen's noisy bird, a law to itself in the forest.
Rihm's Klavierstuck No.5, which ended the recital, could be said to have mingled order and disorder in an abundance of gestural phases which delivered less than they promised.
The first performance of Quartet for the End of Time took place 60 years ago to the day in a German prison camp. Inspired by passages from the Apocalypse of St John, it must have had religious significance and, given its origins, political significance as well. The extra-musical dimension needs to be implied if a performance is to succeed.
To my mind, it was John Finucane's long clarinet solo that came closest to evoking the composer's concepts of time and eternity. The long cello solo (Aisling DruryByrne) and the long violin solo (Michael d'Arcy) both approached the desired feeling of time being held in suspension, but were not totally persuasive. The fourth of the eight movements, a little scherzo, gave the players an opportunity for light-heartedness, and they revelled in it. It was a welcome interlude in the solemnity of the "marvellous visions".
The Magnetic Fields - HQ, Hot Press Hall of Fame.
There's so much aching, bitter-sweet beauty in Stephen Merritt's music that it's difficult to know whether to laugh, cry or stare pensively into the middle distance. The Magnetic Fields's frontman has an eerie flair for comedic melancholy; his lyrics interweave flippant wordplay, wry observation and keening despair.
In 69 Love Songs, the diminutive Merritt fashioned a sprawling opus of fragile loveliness. On stage, his lachrymose vignettes blossom into swooning technicolor wonders. Clad in shaggy sweaters and threadbare cords, the members of Merritt's backing band may resemble mildly left-of-centre post-graduate students, but they are svelte musicians, gilding his bleak odes to heartbreak and obsession in an ornate filigree of strings, piano and banjo. There was a reverential hush at HQ as Merritt strummed the opening chords of A Pretty Girl is Like on ukulele. The biting acoustic jape flirts with sexism, but Merritt is clearly baiting misogynists rather than celebrating them.
The four-piece hit its stride with I Don't Believe in the Sun, a dolorous lament recalling Nick Cave at his least overwrought. Stripped to their barest essence, the best moments from 69 Love Songs - I Don't Want to Get Over You, All My Little Words and Papa Was A Rodeo - are reworked as stark, marrow-chilling passages of gothic Americana. Merritt returned for the encore wearing a lurid PVC jacket and diffident grin. Could it be that our doleful hero was actually enjoying himself? A lilting Busby Berkeley Dreams ensued and you didn't want him to stop singing, ever.
