Irish Times critics review performances from Barry Douglas and the Ulster Orchestra with Thierry Fischer at the Waterfront Hall; Taraf de Haïdouks at Vicar Street; Damien Dempsey at the Village; Concorde, Healy at the Hugh Lane Gallery and Mary Gauthier at Whelans.
Barry Douglas, Ulster Orchestra, Thierry Fischer
Waterfront Hall, Belfast
By Dermot Gault
Maskarade Overture - Nielsen. Piano Concerto No 2 - Brahms. Symphony No 5 - Sibelius
Six years after opening, the Waterfront Hall still has mysterious acoustics. They vary enormously, according to where one is sitting. In my seat, right at the back of block B, they were bone dry. The resultant sound quality was hardly likely to do justice to the players - the piano, for instance, sounding metallic.
Perhaps for this reason Barry Douglas seemed happiest in the finale of the Brahms, in which there was some sparkling fingerwork, and perhaps for this reason too one would have liked more poetry in the first movement and more passion in the second. But there was more natural feeling in the third movement and in his encore, the barcarole from Tchaikovsky's The Seasons.
The unforgiving clarity of the sound did allow one to appreciate crisp playing in the overture to Nielsen's comic opera Maskarade, a novelty of which one would like to hear more, and in the Sibelius symphony. Each of the minute details on whose cumulative impact the effect of the work depends was in place. Fischer paid careful attention to balance, and his spacious conclusion realised the work's epic stature.
Beethoven's Prometheus Overture, another encore, looked forward to the Beethoven cycle that Fischer will conduct next season. As with his recent Schubert cycle, tempos were very fast, and the overall impression was of a rather hard-boiled efficiency, but the playing was rhythmical and well phrased.
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Taraf de Haïdouks
Vicar Street, Dublin
By Peter Crawley
Reversing the order of the global village, this Romanian gypsy ensemble have taken the lautari traditions of their home town of Clejani and spun their delirium around the world. Since the demise of Ceausescu's enforced isolation, Taraf de Haïdouks have become world-music stars with all the usual trimmings: movie roles, high-profile collaborations, runway modelling (honest) and palling around with Johnny Depp.
No sooner have the dapper 13-piece taken the stage than Vicar Street is whirling to their frankly impossible rhythms. The typical form of the Haïdouks' mercurial violin, accordion, flute and cymbalum arrangements is to begin at breakneck speed, shift things up a gear and, finally, really let rip.
Years of graft as a wedding band (Romanian weddings can last three days) seem to have honed the indefatigable drive of the transgenerational big band. From 20-year-old cymbalum pounders to septuagenarian crooners, they play with an infectious energy.
With whoops greeting each astonishing leap in speed, melodic complexity and asymmetric, mournful tones tend to get lost in the pyrotechnics, the ache submerged by ecstasy. Virtuosic improvisations are pure jazz, and the rhythm can positively swing. Elsewhere, contrapuntal intricacy reflects classical composition and vocal ululations recall the gypsies' Indian origins.
And it's great fun.By the time Filip Simeonov has methodically dismantled his clarinet during a flashy solo and flute genius Gheorghe Falcaru is playing through his nostril, the inevitable result of such unflinching crowd-pleasing is one distinctly pleased crowd.
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Damien Dempsey
The Village, Dublin
By Siobhán Long
Damien Dempsey has been lionised by media too lazy to dig deeper than the tortured-soul lyrics of his debut, They Don't Teach This Shit In School. His detractors have largely kept their counsel, perhaps intimidated by the laurels chucked in his direction by the holy trinity of Sinéad O'Connor, Shane MacGowan and Christy Moore.
Dempsey's diatribes against social injustice never quite rang true. His fondness for well-worn subjects (drugs, violence), his limited vocal range and his desire to unearth a lineage rich in rap connections jarred rather than impressed. And his ode to his beloved Dubalin hinted at a visual field blinkered rather than enhanced by experience.
But Damien Dempsey Mk II is a different animal. Terse and taut where once he was simply tense and laboured, every muscle and fibre of his being have grown into the core of the music. And that core is a rhythmic sensibility that far outweighs the lyrical or melodic dimensions of his repertoire.
Dempsey has matured into a musician who can carry the anthemic (The Colony), the cathartic (Love Yourself Today) and the hymnal (Seize The Day, the title track of this new album) with equal ease. Where once he lumbered, now he soars, no longer fettered to his hulking guitar, freed by a band that's sympathetic to his cause. Wayne Sheehy's percussion, Steve Wickham's fiddle and Ciarán Quinn's accordion and keyboards extend Dempsey's palette, elevating his music to higher plains. His words are still raw, his arguments not particularly original, but fuelled by his band he's embarking on the first real step towards inhabiting a voice that might find its way home yet.
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Concorde, Healy
Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin
By Douglas Sealy
Echoes (2001) - Jennifer Fowler. Night And Day (1992) - Jacob ter Veldhuis. Music from the Reed Bed (2002) - Bill Campbell
The echoes in Jennifer Fowler's piece for flute, clarinet, violin, cello and piano can be heard as the melodic motifs are transferred from one line to another and in what the composer has called archaic cadences. Her polyphony does not, however, progress in an unbroken line but breaks off from time to time unsettlingly, mixing the inventive with what sounds merely academic.
Night And Day, for bass clarinet and accordion, by the Dutch composer Jacob ter Veldhuis, got the most out of the unusual pairing of instruments, exploiting rich velvety tones in the nocturnal section, which opened into quirky jazz-inspired rhythms with the advent of day - not the dawn chorus but an urban symphony of cars and their horns. It was beguiling, with Paul Roe on bass clarinet and Dermot Dunne on accordion.
In Music From The Reed Bed, Dermot Healy read his poems to an accompaniment of flute, clarinet, violin, cello and piano. His voice was amplified and there was no problem of balance, but, as is so often the case, the spoken word made the music fade into the mental background and vice versa. Bill Campbell's music formed a sort of commentary on the words, agreeable to listen to but not inseparable from them.
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Mary Gauthier
Whelans, Dublin
By Tony Clayton-Lea
A slight figure in black shirt and leather trousers, looking like a refugee from a rock 'n' roll tour bus, the underrated Louisiana-born singer-songwriter Mary Gauthier trades her wariness and warmth for applause.
It's a fair enough exchange, as Gauthier's songs ring true no matter what topic she focuses on. Be it corruption (Sugar Cane), divorce (Empty Spaces), loneliness (Let Me Out, Set Me Free), the loss of love (Long Way To Fall), adoption (Good-Bye) or the fragile interface between real emotions and false optimism (Camelot Hotel), Gauthier sings it as if she has lived it.
Songwriting, she says in an insightful and amusing between-song ramble, "only looks like rocket science". The implication is that anyone can do it, which is true; what isn't true is that everyone can do it as well as songwriters like Gauthier.
What is interesting, though, is not her song structures, which are in the mould of Bob Dylan and Neil Young's, but her lyrics: she is a poet of calm authority. If we can glean any of the self through her songs, then she clearly has problems of her own. But that's part of the exchange, too.
Gauthier's songs of cheaters, liars, outlaws and fallen angels are as much therapy for her as for the audience. The admission fee, as several lost-in-thought people at this performance would no doubt confirm, is a small price to pay for such guidance.
