Irish Times writers review the RTE Philharmonic Choir, Tom Moore, the Ulster Orchestra and Claudio Bohorquez and Martin Helmchen.
RTÉ Philharmonic Choir, RTÉ NSO/Markson
NCH, Dublin
By Martin Adams
Berlioz: La damnation de Faust.
Many of Berlioz's musical contemporaries thought he was out of his mind. In reality, he was outside their own boxed-in conventions. That much is evident throughout La damnation de Faust (1846).
Berlioz described this towering peculiarity of 19th-century music as a "dramatic legend", and informally as a "concert opera".
At all times, conductor Gerhard Markson was a steady hand over an elaborate score that requires two choirs, four soloists and large orchestra - with some sections off-stage. It was one of those occasions when everyone strove to do justice to an extraordinary artistic vision.
It was a memorable occasion too, with strong playing from the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra, virile students' choruses from the boys' choirs of Clongowes Wood College and De La Salle College Waterford, and an apt range of sonorities from the RTÉ Philharmonic Choir as peasants, angels, demons and so on. That was despite a general impression of the large choir's security being sometimes on the edge.
Soprano Ann Murray was at her best in her delicate handling of Marguerite's quieter songs. However, when singing high and loud there was a coarsening of tone and widening of vibrato that I have not previously associated with her. Darren Jeffrey (bass) offered strong support as Brander, and Gerard O'Connor had presence in the principal bass role of Mephisopheles, even though his expression tended to be generalised, not as aware of the nuances of language and shape than was the object of his malevolent attentions, Faust himself.
In that role, tenor Peter Hoare stood out. His sound was tense, commanding, and always pleasing. Completely at home with the finer points of French expression, he was a highlight in a lively performance of music which has lost none of its power to surprise.
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Tom Moore
Mother Redcaps
By Siobhán Long
How much wiser it is to celebrate the good times when you're around to enjoy them? Too often magical gatherings such as this are staged posthumously and suffer from an inevitably maudlin undercurrent.
Saturday night's packed house in Christchurch knew to expect something entirely different though. This was a knees up to top 'em all.
Despite his accumulation of six decades on this planet, Moore's vocal cords have been mercifully immune to the hazards of ageing. They're still laden with the same bare naked vulnerability that set him apart back in the early 1970s when he hit Sligo from his native California with nothing more than a guitar and a fluent pen.
The seven ages of Moore were conjured up and celebrated with a rake of old friends and a handful of newer ones too. Polymath accordionist Mairtín O'Connor took up a rightful position as Moore's right-hand man, slipping and sliding into the nooks and crannies of his songs with the agility of a Soviet ice skater in his prime.
Younger acquaintances paid equally fine tribute, from Dervish's multi-tasker Seamie O'Dowd (on slide guitar and fiddle) and Gavin Ralston (on guitar) to the mysteriously monikered Isabelle who commanded a magnificent and voluminous piano accordion with delicious ease.
And so they rolled the gemstones on: from The Scholar to Cavan Girl and Saw You Running, and embracing an unapologetically reconstructed cover of The Lakes Of Ponchartrain. Accompanied by O'Dowd (in Ry Cooder mode), Moore managed to recapture the essence of a song that's been hackneyed and disembowelled by every singer/songwriter to grace a stage. Surely evidence of what happens when appetite and genius supersede more mundane considerations of repertoire such as commercial viability and singalongability.
And gloriously, some of Moore's most pristine offerings came from his last album (albeit released in 1994), Gorgeous And Bright. His tale of his grandfather's disappearance on Soldier On was a lesson on the merits of brevity, his ability to conjure a word picture of a man who disappeared some three decades before his birth surely reflecting a writer who listens every bit as much (and more) than he writes.
If music is to add anything to our quality of life, then Saturday night tested its mettle - and it emerged not so much triumphant as celebratory.
Would that we could all celebrate our time on the planet with such a gorgeous palette of songs, and a close gathering of friends.
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Ulster Orchestra - Thierry Fischer
Ulster Hall, Belfast
By Dermot Gault
Beethoven - Egmont Overture. Triple Concerto. Symphony No 3. Eroica
The Eroica, with which the first round of Thierry Fischer's Beethoven cycle came to an end, is one of the more tradition-encrusted of the nine symphonies, one which should in theory gain from an Historically Informed approach which takes the composer's challenging metronome markings into account.
The trouble is that performances which follow Beethoven's markings can end up sounding hard, tight and scaled-down - "like Mendelssohn with a headache" to quote one critic.
The Ulster Orchestra played with agility. Fischer has a surer sense of pulse than some period-instrument conductors one could mention, and he has clearly lavished care on balance and accentuation. But he could not prevent the faster movements from sounding constricted, or save detail from being lost in the general rush.
Oddly enough, it was the Funeral March, the movement which specifically evokes the heroic connotations which have led to the work being mythologized, which worked best. If the final pages were matter of fact, the fugue combined forward movement with a sense of space.
But there are no metronome markings to worry about in the Egmont Overture, and how much more convincing it was as a result.
The Triple Concerto may not be Beethoven's greatest, but it includes a heart-easing slow movement and an attractive Polonaise finale.
One kept wanting the Florestan Trio (Anthony Marwood, violin, Richard Lester, cello, and Susan Tomes, piano) to relish their soloist status more, but they coped with Beethoven's sometimes rather fussy elaboration of detail and produced some beautiful sonorities.
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Claudio Bohórquez - Martin Helmchen
Elmwood Hall, Belfast
By Dermot Gault
Beethoven - Seven Variations on 'Bei Männern'.
Cello Sonata No 3 in A.
Twelve Variations on 'Ein Mädchen oder Weibchen'
BBC Radio 3's series of concerts devoted to Beethoven's chamber music, which runs concurrently with the first part of the Ulster Orchestra's Beethoven cycle, continued with this short recital which framed a middle-period cello sonata with two sets of variations on themes from The Magic Flute. These are the product of the young Beethoven's early years in Vienna in the 1790s, works full of vitality and invention.
It is music which should suit a young player such as Claudio Bohórquez, born in Germany of Peruvian and Uruguayan parents and now resident in Berlin. He plays with style and understanding, but it is the full singing tone of his cello, particularly in the lower register, which made the strongest impression.
It is hard for the piano to equal the cello in expressiveness, but even so one wished for a more yielding tone and less generous pedalling from pianist Martin Helmchen, at least in the first set of variations and the opening movement of the sonata.
The sonata's finale found him a more responsive partner.
For me the most intriguing part of the recital was not by Beethoven at all, but was found in the encores, two early pieces by Anton Webern, a cellist himself, from 1899. An aphorist already at 16, the late-romantic idiom is already shot through with the delicate intensity Webern was to make his own in his later works. The players made every note and every nuance count, the only way to convey the essence of such rarefied pieces.
