Irish Times writers review a selection of music events, including the weekend's REM concert and Snoop Dogg at the Point.
REM, Point, Dublin
Sometimes it takes a while for greatness to reveal itself. When REM arrive onstage in Dublin's Point theatre for the first of two sold-out shows, it's easy to think you're in the presence of a once-potent pop outfit gone to seed. But, after a couple of hours in the Athens, Georgia band's company, you feel as if you've had an audience with an eminent personage - not exactly rippling with excitement, but good enough to reaffirm your belief.
REM may not be the colossus they once were - the current album, Around The Sun, is a passable but patchy collection - but they're still the nearest thing America has to a conscience, and when the trio perform two "songs of protest" aimed squarely at the Bush administration and the citizens who condone its actions, you kind of wish they still sold zillions of records.
The thin, besuited figure of Michael Stipe stands tightly-coiled centre-stage, an eerie, dark blue stripe painted like a mask across his eyes - middle-aged mutant ninja salesman. Mike Mills and Peter Buck look rangy by comparison, all flowing locks, flowery shirts and wide, sweeping guitars and backing vocals. They're augmented by their usual cohorts, including Ken Stringfellow on keyboards, and backed by muted stage lighting and a long, rectangular screen above the stage.
Songs from their new album, Around The Sun, seem to blossom onstage, particularly Leaving New York and new single Electron Blue; oddly, they dispense with Everybody Hurts early in the set, which dulls its emotional punch, but there's still a shiver when Stipe rips into its climbing climax. For fans who only came to REM after their huge-selling Automatic For The People, early songs such as Seven Chinese Brothers might seem strange and unfamiliar, but Orange Crush has now become integral to REM's live appeal, with its sten-gun drums and rumbling riffs.
By the time they encore with What's The Frequency, Kenneth?, Exhuming McCarthy, The Great Beyond and Man On The Moon, it's finally sunk in that, yes, REM are still great and no, it doesn't matter which songs they play from their 20-year career, because they play them all with heart and soul.
Kevin Courtney
Linehan, RTÉ NSO/Anissimov, NCH, Dublin
Stravinsky - Le Chant du Rossignol. Concerto for piano and wind. Tchaikovsky - Symphony No 6 (Pathétique).
Two great musicians, pianist Arthur Rubinstein and conductor Serge Koussevitzky, helped focus the attention of Igor Stravinsky on the piano during the 1920s.
An encounter with Rubinstein inspired Stravinsky to create his Three Movements from Petrushka for piano solo. And when Koussevitzky commissioned a piano concerto, he encouraged the composer to appear as soloist in the première, and in the process launched Stravinsky on a lucrative performing career.
A stream of other piano works followed, though none of them has ever achieved the popularity of the fiendishly difficult Petrushka pieces.
The work for Koussevitzky, the Concerto for Piano and Wind Instruments of 1924, is fashionably dry and percussive. The writing in the outer movements is motorically driven, bitingly angular, often acerbic, and even the calmer central Largo often has a sharp, lemony tang.
Conor Linehan, Friday's soloist with the RTÉ NSO, clearly relished the challenges of creating and sustaining the necessary energy, and conductor Alexander Anissimov delivered the distinctive wind textures with characterful colouring. However, with the wind players in their customary position on the stage, and the piano placed much further back than usual in order to be close to them, the balances the conductor secured did allow key moments of the piano writing to be obscured.
Anissimov was in desultory form for the opening work, Stravinsky's Song of the Nightingale. The fantastical chinoiserie of this symphonic poem, fashioned out of music from the opera The Nightingale in 1917, was first heard in concert in 1919, and produced as a ballet in 1920.
The original opera is beset with issues of style, as Stravinsky began it in 1908, had to interrupt work on it to write The Firebird for Diaghilev, and didn't return to it until 1913, after he had completed The Rite of Spring.
The symphonic poem seeks to resolve matters by ditching all of the music in the earlier style. But the work remains elusive, and Friday's plodding performance failed to bring to it the necessary flair and sparkle.
Anissimov was in much finer form for the closing work, Tchaikovsky's Pathétique Symphony, which he delivered in his weightiest manner, the pacing deliberate, the emotional charge high, the sound full and heavy.
Michael Dervan
Snoop Dogg, Point, Dublin
Channelling the poetry of praise, one effusive fan finally hit on the right words: "Off tha hizzle, fo' shizzle ma nizzle!" As cogent as his Snoop-speak sounded, not everybody was quite so shizzle. Although it was widely reported that hip-hop legend Dr Dre would join Snoop onstage, ultimately there was no doctor in the house.
Disappointing, yes, but no calamity. After all, this was the first Irish appearance for the brightest star of 90s gangsta rap, the tireless advocate of sleepy-eyed stoner humour and, latterly, Hollywood's cameo performer du jour. With or without Dre, Snoop Dogg would have his day.
Having seen off such early career setbacks as murder trials, label difficulties and the untimely demise of several friends, Snoop here faced a more mundane, yet intractable problem in the sold-out Point.
That problem was hip-hop.
For all its restless innovation, expert flow and impenetrable braggadocio, hip-hop frequently fidgets onstage. And, confronted with a cavernous venue, Snoop resorts to more hoary clichés than pantomime.
So, when he says, "Hell", we say, "Yeah". When he says, "Ire" we say, "Land". Hands are duly thrown in the air. Casually misogynist lyrics are balanced with "somethin' for the ladeez". It doesn't help that when Snoop - possibly the thinnest man in hip-hop - dons an oversized Irish rugby jersey, he looks like a toothpick dressed in a tent. Nor does the murky sound favour his trademark rap style, which affects a murmurous drawl even at bullet speeds.
Although Nuthin' But a 'G' Thang gets lost in a thankless medley, Snoop does afford enough space to let Beautiful, Gin and Juice, thrilling new single Drop it Like it's Hot and a roof-raising What's My Name properly shine. "This is the livest motherf**kin' place on the planet," the motionless rapper hollers, inexplicably. Still, the crowd go wild. Personality, it seems, goes a long way.
Peter Crawley
