Irish Times writers review RTE NSO at the National Concert Hall, Kathleen Edwards at Whelans and the Michael Nyman Band.
RTÉ NSO/Pearce, NCH, Dublin
György Ligeti - Ramifications. Ives - The Unanswered Question. Lutoslawski - Symphonic Variations.
Jerome de Bromhead - Symphony No 1
The featured composer for the third of this year's four Horizons concerts was Jerome de Bromhead. He was born in 1945 in Waterford, and his steady output of works for various ensembles includes two symphonies. The first of these was completed in 1985, and premiered early the following year by the then RTÉ Symphony Orchestra and conductor Bryden Thomson.
It was interesting to hear this programme in the context of the composer's comments about the symphony: "My music is based on the lyrical impulse and my first contact with music was singing. My Symphony No 1 (1986) represents an attempt to produce optimistically singing lines."
In some sense or other, all the music in this concert aspires to lyricism, including Ligeti's Ramifications (1969), which was played in the version for string orchestra.
One of the most important aspects of this piece is the gradual emergence of focus, out of textures that initially create calculated confusion.
Dispelling that confusion requires more precision than was achieved in this performance by the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra and conductor Colman Pearce.
However, that was a low point in a concert that featured playing of considerable energy. That included the slowly measured tread of Ives's The Unanswered Question (1908), which saw some pleasingly shaped playing from the four flutes and solo trumpet, and the rhythmic drive of Lutoslawski's Symphonic Variations (1938).
Jerome de Bromhead's Symphony No 1 wears its lyricism lightly, in a way that does not immediately show its essentially conservative nature. In one movement and several distinct sections, it unfolds and reworks textures that include some striking effects; though the nature of the material implies a type of connectedness that is not always achieved. However, this performance's certainty of gesture and clarity of shape helped create an experience that was always engaging. - Martin Adams
Series concludes on Tues at 1.05pm with music by Rhona Clarke, Pascal Dusapin, Takemitsu and Michael Alcorn. Admission free
Kathleen Edwards, Whelan's, Dublin
Ex-Prayer Boat frontman, Emmet Tinley had surprisingly little difficulty stilling the packed house. Tinley (whose solo debut is Attic Faith) is lucky enough to have a voice with Jeff Buckley's emotional fragility and a feisty tenacity of his own. Snapshots of his original material from Dead Flowers to It Hurts To Lose You hint at a musician quarrying a road with a few uncharted twists.
Kathleen Edwards started like she meant to go on with a bracing assault on material from her second album, Back To Me. Fuelled by an unexpectedly fiery attitude, and a four-piece band that squeezed every last drop of energy from the tightest of arrangements, Edwards let it rip on everything from the battered and bruised Away to the rational and reflective Good Things.
Her clenched-teeth style of delivery wasn't helped by a mix that had the vocals buried beneath some admittedly potent lead guitar courtesy of her husband, Colin Cripps, but Edwards was more intent on rocking out than on engaging in any confessional intimacies. Cosseted by Jim Bryson on keyboards and guitar (whose pristine Somewhere Else she saved until her encore), along with bassist Kevin McCarragher and drummer Joel Anderson, Edwards had every reason to be cocky. Theirs is a swagger that's earned rather than assumed: their guitar lines colliding with keyboards and percussion in almost balletic formation.
Edwards' waspy personality is a refreshing alternative to the smiley, happy women who grace our stages so often these days. She was clearly electrified as much by the potential for delivering ear-splitting guitar lines, as by the emotional intricacies of Summerlong and Hockey Skates, which she duly delivered on request, much to the delight of a crowd on side from the start.
A tad more clarity in the vocals would have been welcome, but Kathleen Edwards plays it her way anyway, and if her 2003 debut, Failer, was a snapshot of a musician revving up at the starting gates, this was a gig that saw her ricocheting down the highway with not a trace of a crash helmet in sight. A magnificent adrenalin rush from start to finish. - Siobhán Long
The Michael Nyman Band, National Concert Hall
'Classical music' is a term that does few favours for a living composer. Carrying the dead echoes of an antonym for popular music, it leaves a vital musician such as Michael Nyman in a peculiar place. Schooled in the English Baroque and tracing its repetitive and contrapuntal reach through the experimental influence of John Cage and Steve Reich, Nyman's metier was minimalism - as a critic he actually coined the term.
It is, however, his prolific career in scoring films that has harnessed his influences together and earned Nyman a popularity uncommon in avant-garde circles. Committed to a programme drawn exclusively from his film scores, his adept ensemble, The Michael Nyman Band, traced the congruities between works as varied as Wonderland to Prospero's Books and The Piano to The Draughtsman's Contract. If film composing serves a pre-set narrative, the picture informing and restraining a musician's palette, the Wonderland suite was by turns involving and distancing. Without visual impetus, tempo changes seemed bracing but arbitrary; a tremendous sweep of strings yielding to an insistent clamour of brass without consequence.
Yet cast yourself in the action, and a world vividly materialises around you: distressed violins performing in wandering counterpoint through The End of the Affair, a piano sounds the mournful notes of rain tapping a windowpane. Better still, The Claim and Prospero's Books teetered routinely between the characteristic restraint of Nyman's stately melodies and the inextinguishable passion of ever-layering, agitated phrases, underpinned by grumbling brass ostinatos.
Nyman's under-appreciated capacity for emotional manipulation rang through the simple and effective pieces from The Piano (performed solo), ultimately abandoning itself to the mock-heroic gallop of The Libertine or The Draughtsman's Contract's relentlessly engaging theme.
Honoured with a spontaneous standing ovation, the origins of The Michael Nyman Band may have been minimalist, but their reception was anything but. - Peter Crawley
