Michael Dervan reports from the West Cork Chamber Music Festival while Tony Clayton-Lea heard Alphastates in Whelans.
West Cork Chamber Music Festival
Bantry, Co Cork
By Michael Dervan
On Monday, for the second day in succession, the festival featured a piano trio in its noon Coffee Concert slot. The Sans Souci Piano Trio (Elizabeth Cooney, violin, Gabriella Swallow, cello, and Huw Watkins, piano) could hardly have offered a greater contrast to the Osiris Trio, heard on Sunday.
The Sans Soucis are the younger of the two groups but sound the wiser in terms of balanced ensemble playing. They know how to blend and how to retain presence of line without giving the impression of, as it were, talking over their colleagues.
They made the most of the earnest introduction to Beethoven's Kakadu variations and the light-hearted theme that follows, and they found an apt, unforced fluidity in Mendelssohn's C-minor trio. Watkins's Lullaby, written for amateur performance, provided a short makeweight between the two larger works.
Not all of the detail in the trio's playing was finely wrought, which is not a point that could be made about the Portuguese pianist Artur Pizarro. His afternoon recital was devoted to Prokofiev, the suite of pieces the composer arranged from the ballet Romeo and Juliet and the Sixth Sonata.
Pizarro is a pianist's pianist. That's not to say that he ignored the orchestral original in the Romeo and Juliet pieces or that he sought cheap display there or in the sonata. He's a far more subtle performer than that. But he does pay attention to piano sonority in a way that sometimes distracts him from a directness of expression that would allow the music to speak more simply and more effectively.
But, then, of course, the playing wouldn't sound as pianistically impressive. And, as his choice of encore, a beautifully cultured performance of an Earl Wild arrangement of a Rachmaninov song, spelled out, pianistic impressions clearly matter.
The contrast between Pizarro and Irina Schnittke could hardly be greater. She, of course, had the advantage of playing something that was written for her - her late husband's Second Sonata - but, beyond that, in this late work she at all times seemed concerned with what was beyond the notes rather than what could be done to them. The music is more spare than most of the composer's earlier work and communicates with an almost Berg-like expressionism.
Irina Schnittke showed an acute perception of the music's linear tension and harmonic weight, so it sounded at once old-fashioned and entirely novel.
The day's performances also included the Silesian Quartet in Szymanowski's First Quartet, a piece that's full of gorgeous moments, which the players exploited admirably, but doesn't sound strongly cohesive as a whole. The German baritone Christian Gerhaher added significantly to his Irish fan club with a performance of Schubert's Schwanengesang that was notable for its vocal beauty and its apt scaling. I don't think I've heard another singer who has matched voice to venue with such skill in the library of Bantry House. And the Petersen Quartet, making their festival debut in Mozart's late Quartet in F, K590, conjured up some of the most magical delicacy it's been my good fortune to hear in a Mozart quartet in many a year.
Alphastates
Whelans, Dublin
By Tony Clayton-Lea
Cramped stage? Inattentive audience? People yapping into their mobile phones while songs are being introduced? Noise from the bar occasionally drowning out the music? Welcome to the back-to- square-one syndrome of an Irish act that has had to change its name because of legal action from a rock band in another country.
Alphastates (Catherine Dowling, Gerry Horan and Karl Odlum) used to be known as Babelfish, and this gig is their rechristening. If the sparsely attended performance proved one thing, it was that although the name may have changed the songs remain the
same.
And what gorgeous songs they are. Last year's single, Conversations With Robots, highlighted the band's handy knack of knocking out a pop tune infused with a luscious, unselfconscious sense of artiness. If this means that the slow- burning, hypnotic Last Day Of Summer sounds like Philip Glass backed by New Order, then so be it.
Other songs, including Top Of The World, Serenade, Gypsy, and Addicted, attested to the band's use of smart dynamics and an almost too casual build-up to a plateau of accessible, eminently hummable alt.pop.
Technical difficulties hampered the instrumental sound from taking flight, but Dowling's vocals simply floated: simultaneously husky and light, subtle and exploratory, they wove their way into and around the music like special-effects smoke.
It's early days, of course. Name familiarisation is crucial, which is why Alphastates will be touring over the next month or two, as well as appearing at the Witnness festival (on the Upstage, Saturday, July 12th).
You'd be advised to keep a keen eye out for them - as well as to keep a tuned ear out for inappropriate use of mobile phones.
