Irish Times writers review the AXA Dublin International Piano Competition at the RDS and an exhibition by Mary Lohan at the Vangard Gallery, Cork.
AXA Dublin International Piano Competition, Round 1
RDS, Dublin
Sitting alertly through 59 young pianists playing half-hour programmes of their choosing, as the jurors of the AXA Dublin International Piano Competition have done, is no easy task.
... The first round of the competition amounts to the equivalent of nearly 20 full concerts compressed into four
days.
The players have a free choice of repertoire within the strictly enforced time constraints, and although this is a plus in terms of musical and mental sanity it can leave everyone with a strange basis for comparison: Liszt's arrangement of six Chopin songs and Ginastera's American Preludes versus Rachmaninov's Corelli Variations with Ligeti's Zauberlehrling and Albéniz's Triana versus Mozart's Fantasy in C minor and Carl Vine's Sonata
No 1.
The players, says the rule book, should show skills of programme building, the grasp of a variety of musical styles and depth of musicianship rather than technical brilliance.
The 13-member jury is heavily biased towards people with teaching backgrounds and previous jury experience. So it can come as little surprise that they often appear to work the priorities in a different order, in favour of the technical standards their professional activities so consistently support.
In these terms, the standard of this year's first round was consistently high. There were players to take one's breath away. Siheng Song (21) from China has astonishing technical resources (though marred with moments of outrageously bad taste), Marco Fatinchenti (22) from Italy gives the impression that he could kill a piano quicker than any man alive (killing Brahms and Stravinsky seemed a by-product of the pianistic approach), and Andrey Ponochevny (26) from Belarus played Schubert and Liszt with a flamboyance that masked any acquaintance with the original
songs.
Far better, to my way of thinking, were Rachmaninov's dangerously recursive Corelli Variations in a cunningly shaped reading by Yurie Miura (21) from Japan, Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody No 12 from Ilya Rashkovsky (18) of Russia, brilliant in all the best senses, part of Bartók's Out Of Doors suite from Matan Porat (21, Israel) and the strongly projected Copland Variations of Brenda Jones (24, US). It was good, too, to find the daringly understated Ravel Valses Nobles Et Sentimentales from Heidi Hau (27, US) being rewarded.
All the players I've mentioned so far made it into the second round. I was sorry to lose two sensitive Italians, Domenico Codispoti (27) and Lorenzo
di Bella (29), and would like to have heard more of Mariko Sano (28, Japan), whose grasp of Brahmsian warmth seemed so sure.
There are many other names worth mentioning, both successful and unsuccessful. But, with 13 people assessing such variety of repertoire from so many players, the humps in the committee-designed camel of round two will never completely satisfy anyone who had been expecting a horse, let alone a musical one.
Round 2 isat the RDS today and tomorrow
Michael Dervan
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Mary Lohan: Shorelines
Vangard Gallery, Cork
Mary Lohan's paintings demonstrate a number of contrasting qualities that appear initially to directly contradict each other.
On the one hand, their representation of the Irish coastline is suggested by sedate compositions that sweep with gentle grace and elegance. But look
again and the paintings are
bursting with energy and seem to
scream spontaneity, opposing the stillness of the original view.
It is this conflict within Lohan's paintings that gives them a vital edge and is the reason they are a roller-coaster ride for the senses.
From a distance, the heavy impasto used throughout melts into a homogenous unit, where variations of muted but naturalistic tones achieve at times a quite heightened sense of realism.
Swathes of paint take on the mantle of land, sea and sky, with flecks and furrows of colour becoming the details of foliage, sand, trees and clouds.
The experience is a highly seductive one for the viewer, as it must have been for the artist during her contact with the landscape.
The diptych and triptych formats that Lohan uses add an interesting
dimension to the work, with gaps between the edges of the canvases magnifying the turbulent surface of the impasto even further.
For the purist, the interference of the edges will distract somewhat from engagement with the landscape view itself.
But ultimately these devices act as a challenge to the eye, meaning that Lohan's paintings are not a sentimental or romanticised vision of the landscape - and for that are all the more unusual in their ambition.
Runs until May 17th
Mark Ewart
