ICO/Nicholas McGegan, St Patrick's Cathedral, DublinThe Irish Chamber Orchestra is off to New York next Tuesday for an appearance at Carnegie Hall, where St Patrick's Day itself is given over to Mahler's Seventh Symphony from the San Francisco Symphony under Michael Tilson Thomas.
The music the orchestra is bringing to New York under its music director Nicholas McGegan - heard in Limerick on Wednesday and St Patrick's Cathedral in Dublin on Thursday in support of the Chernobyl Children's Project International - is a world apart from Mahler. The programme is billed as a tribute to the late Frank Patterson, and is clearly intended to evoke a wide range of Irish associations.
Tenor PJ Hurley sang groups of Irish songs in the middle of each half, some of Thomas Moore's Irish Melodies in the first, a mixed group including The Kerry Dance and Macushla in the second. He sang with strong tone, but his delivery was stiff, even ungainly, and tone production seemed at all times to be prioritised over the natural flow and inflection of the words.
The programme included genuflections to earlier times, through the pastiche of TC Kelly's 1977 O'Carolan Suite in Baroque Style, and the authentic flavour of Handel's Concerto Grosso in A, Op. 6 No. 11.
Both were performed with typical colouristic resource and rhythmic spring under McGegan's alert direction.
The Ireland of the present was addressed through two specially-commissioned works, John Kinsella's Triptych, a setting of Séamus Heaney for speaker (Gerard McSorley) and string orchestra, and Bill Whelan's Carna, which called for three soloists, traditional fiddle (Zoë Conway), lilter (Morgan Crowley), and dancer (Colin Dunne).
Both works gravitated towards the mood-setting mannerisms of background music, as if the primary concern in each case were to support and highlight something outside of the music itself, the text in the Kinsella, and images associated with Connemara in the Whelan. Given that music came into Whelan's imagery, Carna sometimes split into layers, the foreground usually being taken by the direct statements of the solo traditional fiddler.
While the Kinsella showed a certain delicately shaded individuality, and Whelan skilfully returned to Riverdance-like territory to evoke his greatest triumph, neither piece fully avoided the clichés of modern film music. The addition of a lilter as well as a dancer to the final movement of Carna seemed like overkill, especially as Crowley's spirited contribution on this occasion struck more than its fair share of sour notes.
As an evening of Irish music for a modern Irish audience, this programme seemed to fall between stools, fighting oddly shy both of the best of the new and the best of the old. - Michael Dervan
Dead Can Dance, The Olympia, Dublin
It's rarely a mystery when a concert sells out quickly. And if the performers have reformed after nearly a decade apart, well, one can anticipate a power surge of interest. But when that group happened to be a protean oddity, largely ignored during its natural lifetime, one does wonder: why the rush? The fire might have gone out for Dead Can Dance in 1996, but never underestimate the zeal of a cult following; embers can glow fiercely beneath the ashes. Music is short on explorers, and moving from punk through short-term leases in goth-rock, before settling on a spiritual combination of operatic, classical, medieval and rock music, the relentlessly seeking Lisa Gerrard and Brendan Perry have left no tone unturned.
Emerging in a voluminous canary-yellow kimono, Gerrard seems to glide across the stage, her face a picture of serenity, her voice an awe-inspiring instrument. Nierika courses with African beats and drenching synth, beginning the first concert of DCD's reunion tour. But bigger cheers greet Rakim, led by Gerrard's softly padded Chinese dulcimer while she trades ululating vocal lines with Perry.
The night is flavoured by a peculiar mix of globetrotting and time-travel; an unusually bearable "world music" fusion which may rely as much on a medieval hurdy-gurdy as a G5 power mac. Within the space of three songs, for instance, Gerrard's accent-perfect, a cappella rendition of Irish trad (The Wind that Shakes the Barley) leads into Perry's Brechtian Kabaret and then the "medieval rock'n'roll" of Saltarello - inspired by 14th-century Italian dance music.
Historio-musicologists in the audience may audibly rejoice, but it's Gerrard's profoundly moving voice - particularly on new song Love that Cannot Be - that makes the group's four-cornered influences cohere.
Constrained by the cages of contemporary music, the adventurous music fan learns again from this expansive, elevating and consistently surprising sound, that it's a large world after all. - Peter Crawley
RTÉ NSO/David Brophy, NCH, Dublin
Frank Corcoran - Quasi un Lamento
Lutoslawski - Musique funèbre
Frank Corcoran - Quasi un Canto
Frank Corcoran writes music mostly at the harsher end of the contemporary spectrum. The style is at times so blunt, brutal and primeval you could imagine it appropriately accompanying images of some darkly disturbing, rarely observed convulsion of nature.
Since his Quasi una Missa of 1991, he's been engaged on a series of works with Quasi in the title, of which the latest to be heard in Dublin are Quasi un Lamento (2004), for a small, wind-rich orchestra with accordion, piano and percussion, and Quasi un Canto (2002), for large orchestra.
Corcoran is a man as rarely short of a colourful word or phrase as of a musical note. "My short one-movement (musical) sculpture," he writes of Quasi un Lamento, "'screams and moans; its seven wind easily overpower anything my string quartet can sob; piano and percussion add a third element of violence."
The pieces are raw and full of sundering. They hold their course like a song sung under the breaking strain of passion. Conductor David Brophy took a cool, measured approach in Tuesday's Horizons concert with the RTÉ NSO, restraining the music's urges, refusing it a level of excess that seems an essential part of its nature.
The composers chosen for representation in the Horizons series themselves choose the actual programmes. Perhaps Brophy was taking his cue from Corcoran's inclusion of Witold Lutoslawski's Musique funèbre for string orchestra.
This work, written in memory of Bartók, and completed in 1958, has a tautly-organised severity that seems unusual for a memorial work. Brophy successfully balanced its symmetries and secured finely-controlled playing from the orchestra's strings. - Michael Dervan
Trio di Parma, St Stephen's Church, Upper Mount Street, Dublin
Haydn - Trio in E flat Hob XV: 10
Shostakovich - Trio in E minor Op 67
Mendelssohn - Trio in D minor Op 49
The death of a dear friend and the ugly reality of war are the dual concerns - private and public - at the heart of Shostakovich's 1944 Trio in E minor. The work was the emotional core of Thursday night's concert programme where it was ideally positioned by the excellent Trio di Parma between contrasting works by Haydn and Mendelssohn.
The work grows from grieving into rage and then sarcasm and dirge. The boisterous finale, with its dancing Jewish theme, contains the work's only suggestion of optimism. The Haydn Trio in E flat that opened the concert has just two movements, quick and really quick. The music's high-spirits and energetic elegance come from the bubbling narrative of the piano part that holds centre-stage throughout. The voice of the violin provides decoration and colour while the cello delicately reinforces the piano's left hand. The overall effect, so well caught in this performance, is of the most genial musical camaraderie.
Mendelssohn's D minor Trio is an obvious romantic counterpart to the Haydn. Although in a minor key and so somewhat different in character as well as in style, the Mendelssohn features the utmost mastery of writing for this combination of instruments, and a wide range of expression from the serious opening to the quicksilver flightiness of the brief scherzo to the abandonof the finale. It was the perfect counterbalance to follow the Shostakovich, just as the Haydn had been an ideal choice to precede it.
This was chamber music-making of a very high order. - Michael Dungan
