Reviewed today are the HMS Pinafore at the Helix, Ian Pace at the Hugh Lane Gallery and Leonard OSC/Collins at the National Concert Hall.
HMS Pinafore/The Helix, Dublin:
The eminent British Carl Rosa Opera Company, in business for 130 unsubsidised years, has also branched out into touring on a major scale. One offshoot of this is the conquest of Irish audiences with its current production of this Gilbert and Sullivan favourite.
There is, as one might expect, a polish to their work. Gilbert's libretto is chock-a-block with send-ups of the English caste system. The muted but absurd chauvinism injected into such numbers as He Is An Englishman, lustily rendered by lead singers and sailors' chorus, permeates the entire plot.
More subtle are the risible nuances tacked on to the romances between aristocrats and ordinary mortals. When the captain's daughter tries in vain to reject the amorous advances of a simple sailor, singing "Refrain, audacious tar", we know that he cannot be so simple. A way must also be found to match the plump and pleasant Mrs Cripps with the lofty but lusty Captain Corcoran.
The singing generally is a fine match for the music, but one unexpected reservation must be made. A few singers, if not inaudible, still suffer from poor projection and pronunciation, so the meaning of their words tended to escape.
But back to the evening's dominant triumphs. Timothy West is a delicious First Lord, ruler of the King's Navy, and, if his voice is light, his vocal control is excellent and intelligible. Steven Page as the Captain sings and acts delightfully, as does Peter Grant as Dick Deadeye. Ann Bourne's soprano as the daughter is strong and musical, and Brenda Longman's Buttercup is most melodious.
• Runs until Saturday
Gerry Colgan
Ian Pace/Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin: Ian Pace is an expert and enthusiastic performer, with a particular interest in the piano music of this and the previous century; he is at home in the rapt asceticism of Richard Emsley's For Piano 6, where a single note could hover between being a self-sufficient entity and being a unit of a drawn-out melody, equally at home in the virtuosic collisions of Deane's Rahu's Rounds, a work commissioned by Hugh Tinney and designed to exploit a vein of demoniac fury that would not normally find expression in Tinney's repertoire.
Alkan-Paganini, by Michael Finnissy, is another virtuosic piece, in which the echoes of romanticism contrive to make the strange almost familiar and the familiar very strange. It is part of an immense work with the intriguing title of The History Of Photography In Sound.
Stockhausen's Klavierstück XII is characteristically accompanied, or interrupted, by unusual sounds: the performer must sing, recite, sigh, whisper, breathe audibly, make clicks with the tongue, scrape a foot along the floor and whistle; the musical import of some of these gestures is unclear, however relevant they may be to the composer in the role of demiurge.
John McLachlan's Nuance, using a limited range of tone colour and rhythmic device, was more reasonable in its demands on the listener and the contrast between the rhythmical treatment of the harmonies in the first section. Pour Les Cinq Doigts, by Luke Stoneham, was inspired by Debussy's Études, but in focusing on "some of the structural and rhetorical aspects" of that composer, what he had to leave out did not seem to me to equal what he put in.
Douglas Sealy
Leonard, OSC/Collins/National Concert Hall, Dublin: The Orchestra of St Cecilia's Vivaldi-Plus series closed with this concert, in which the pianist Finghin Collins made his début at the National Concert Hall as a conductor.
On this evidence he has ideas and can communicate. Tightly sprung rhythm and lively speeds highlighted the origin in stylised dance of Handel's Water Music Suites 1 and 2. The subtler aspects of baroque style needed attention, however. Although the music had the energy of dance, it lacked the airiness, the time to lift the foot and turn.
In the Handel and in Corelli's Christmas Concerto the accented rhythmic style was a good start. There was a tendency towards a uniform treatment of metre, however. The Corelli was still convincing, however, and although there were ragged corners of ensemble it was animated by a lively interaction between the violin soloists and the larger group.
Catherine Leonard directed Vivaldi's The Four Seasons and took the first violin part. The issues of historical style in first half were not an issue - they were ignored. The ghost of Nigel Kennedy's famous recording peeped round the corner, notably in the sliding harmonics of the slow movement from Winter, and the general impression was that this extraordinary music was being explored more for its present possibilities than for any notions of historicism. And why not?
Despite some rough edges, especially in the last concerto, it was evident that Leonard's ability to combine virtuosity of technique, personal panache and solid musicality was inspiring for everyone on the platform. They gave accordingly.
Martin Adams
