Irish Times writers review Kremer, Ulijona, Sudraba & Maisenberg at the National Concert Hall, The Memory of Water at the Lyric, Belfast and Tenacious D at the Olympia
Kremer, Ulijona, Sudraba
& Maisenberg
National Concert Hall, Dublin
Six Canonic Etudes - Schumann/Derevjanko. Triste Per Tre - Desyatnikov. String Trio In C Minor Op 9 No 3 - Beethoven. Piano Trio In B Flat D898 - Schubert
For his National Concert Hall debut, in the NCH/Irish Times Celebrity Series, the Russian violinist Gidon Kremer appeared as part of a quartet that presented a programme of trios. Two works from the heart of the Viennese repertoire were preceded by altogether rarer fare. The six canonic studies of Schumann's Op 56 were written for a piano equipped with an organ-like pedal board. These instruments had a limited currency in the 18th and 19th centuries. Since their demise, the surviving repertoire has often been claimed by organists, although Debussy arranged Schumann's Op 56 for two pianos in 1891. Viktor Derevjanko's arrangement for violin, viola and piano gently nudges the music rather further away from its origins, filling out the texture with occasional and mostly unobtrusive padding. The flexible dynamics of piano and strings serve the music much better than the stiffer lines of the organ.
St Petersburg composer Leonid Desyatnikov's Triste Per Tre for string trio was created from a fragment of film music, and it uses the dissonance- adulterated romanticism that's often encountered in films as an evocation of nostalgia. Kremer and his colleagues played both works with sharply etched gestures and on an intimate scale that lost nothing in intensity through its over-riding delicacy of expression.
This impression of an ensemble in which each player wanted to be able to hear what the others were doing was reinforced in the familiar trios by Beethoven and Schubert. Yet these were not performances that allowed listeners to take anything for granted. Silence was calculated into the players' musical gestures with extreme care, and they surprised with moments that were almost deadpan (illuminatingly so), as well as with others that surged out of shape with unexpected rubato.
Pianist Oleg Maisenberg impressed in the Schubert with his velvet touch, yet the Beethoven string trio spoke more freely. For all the beauty of the playing, the structural challenges of the Schubert were not successfully surmounted, and the music occasionally seemed to wander. The Beethoven, on the other hand, was at all times cogently gripping.
Michael Dervan
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The Memory Of Water
Lyric, Belfast
Memory is like water. It arrives in a torrent or a trickle, sparkling and clear; it settles, reflecting light and colour from other sources; it may make dramatic changes to the landscape before disappearing, leaving a trace that dries to become virtually invisible. Shelagh Stephenson has skilfully captured this sense of shifting reality in her play of family memories, in which three sisters come together for the funeral of their mother, a woman whom in life they ridiculed, fought with, blushed over and belittled. In death, it turns out that they loved her, too, though this admission has to be wrung out of them, almost like a confession of sin. The fact that the once-stylish Violet has died of Alzheimer's disease, stripped of all recollection and identity, adds yet another thread to Stephenson's thickly textured yarn spinning.
Director Mark Lambert's affectionate interpretation deftly casts Orla Charlton, Lynn Cahill and Eileen McCloskey as the warring Heaney sisters, Mary, Teresa and Catherine. The first, a neurologist, is papering over a dark secret with doubled-edged devotion to her career and a married celebrity doctor (Robert Reynolds). The second, a neurotic, is an embittered fusspot, the worst possible advertisement for the natural health supplements she and her put-upon husband (BJ Hogg) sell all over the world. The youngest, an insecure hypochondriac, drifts from country to country, constantly at the sexual beck and call of a string of useless men.
The three actresses fluently capture the ping-pong game of sisterly reminiscences exchanged, transferred and misinterpreted. Stella McCusker's Violet drifts in and out, adding her own observations, not as a ghostly wraith but in a coltish vision of 1950s glamour, making a desperate final attempt at reconciliation with her eldest daughter. But this top-heavy play takes on too many issues and explanations, prolonging some scenes - Teresa's drunken rant, the revelation of Mary's tragedy - beyond their natural lives and dramatic functions, leaving one feeling submerged, rather than cleansed.
Runs until April 12th
Jane Coyle
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Tenacious D
Olympia, Dublin
If Jackass needed a new theme tune or the Devil needed some piped music for the elevator to hell, then who else to summon but Jack Black and Kyle Gass, known to their fans as simply the D? And if you wanted a night of dumb, frat-boy comedy rock, then where else to be but at the Olympia, where the world's biggest duo (literally) threw their combined weight around the stage to the intense delight of their Irish D-ciples. It was big, yes, it was clever in a dumb sort of way and, if you were in on the cosmic joke, then it was a laugh riot all the way.
The premise is simple: take a notorious Hollywood scene-stealer and his beer buddy, give them a couple of acoustic guitars and mics and let them loose on some classic rock 'n' roll songs such as Led Zeppelin's Good Times, Bad Times and the sometimes hilarious tunes from their debut album, including such sensitive material as F*** Her Gently, Jesus Ranch and Cosmic Shame. There's no backing band, just the larger-than-life presence of these two oversized heavy metal maniacs, who can juggle puerile jokes, vocal harmonies and sub-classical guitar workouts with the visceral skill of master butchers.
If you haven't already immersed yourself in the D's dirty little world, then you might be baffled by such mock-epic meisterwerks as Wonderboy, City Hall, Kyle Left The Band and the "greatest song in the world", Tribute. And you'll definitely be grossed out by the interval films, in which the pair try to sell their sperm for posterity and give birth to the world's first "butt baby".
It's a taste that has to be acquired - usually by chugging beer, smoking spliffs, listening to Cheech & Chong albums and, of course, watching Jackass. Tenacious D are definitely a lad's band, but it was amazing how many women in the audience knew the words to F*** Her Gently. It just goes to show that even fat, foul-mouthed blokes in big Y-fronts can become sex symbols.
Kevin Courtney
