A look at what is happening in the world of the arts
Tears For Fears at Vicar Street
These past 22 years have been kind to Roland and Curt. Looking fitter than they ever did during their Top Of The Pops heyday, this is a reunion tour that has the potential to reek of greasy tills ringing but doesn't.
Roland Orzabal still handles his voice like a sledgehammer cracking a nut. It's as if every song and every note is an opportunity for him to prove just how portentous he can be.
Meanwhile, soul boy Curt Smith lopes alongside with a larynx that's fragile, timid and often far more effective in teasing out the intricacies of their back catalogue.
In a lot of ways this was a standard work-out for the boys, albeit one they claimed not to have undertaken "east of the Azores" (another of Orzabal's pretensions percolating to the surface) in 14 years. With a shiny new album on the shelves, aptly (or cynically?) christened Everybody Loves A Happy Ending, they released judicious tasters of the new material, but regularly renewed the cup with the old favourites that everyone had come to hear: Sowing The Seeds Of Love, Everybody Wants To Rule The World, Woman In Chains and a particularly poignant take on Mad World, reclaiming it from Gary Jules whom they can thank for introducing it and them to a brand new audience a decade and a half after they'd split.
The new Tears For Fears material is suitably chastened by their lengthy rift: Closest Thing To Heaven and Who Killed Tangerine reignite those trademark soulful harmonies; Call Me Mellow gives Roland free reign to marmalise a few more eardrums with that mallet of a voice, and Everybody Loves A Happy Ending circles all the wagons just for old time's sake.
Tears For Fears write stadium pop that thrives equally in well-heeled venues like Vicar St. Their penchant for the anthemic has served them well, and an entire audience lip synching to Shout as they exhorted the band back on stage for an encore can't be bad 14 years on.
With fewer synths and louder guitars (including a distinctly over-ripe bass line) than what we remembered them for, Tears For Fears proved that their return to the stage isn't all about the bottom line. Some songs just cry out to be written - and rewritten maybe - but when it's done with such confidence and panache, you just have to smile. Siobhan Long
Murray, RTÉ NSO/Rumstadt at the NCH, Dublin
Mozart - Symphony No 39, Mahler - Rückert Lieder, Schubert - Symphony No 9
The German conductor Guido Johannes Rumstadt followed up his appearances in Opera Ireland's double bill of Zemlinsky and Puccini with his début in the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra's subscription season on Friday.
His approach to Mozart's late Symphony in E flat was of the brisk'n'brusque school. The fast speeds and lean textures delivered good clarity, though the actual sound was rarely of the most refined and the tempo of the Minuet was altogether too wound up to sound plausible.
Concentrated drive was also the feature that stood out in his live-in-the-moment handling of Schubert's Great C major Symphony.
The lack of warmth in the conducting brought a rather clinical air to the predominantly light-textured orchestrations of Mahler's Rückert Lieder.
The effect was less than ideally supportive of mezzo soprano Ann Murray, who sang mostly with reserve , but flashed into impassioned overdrive in climaxes.
Both conductor and singer were at their finest in the closing song, Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen, with its tone of heart-broken, peaceful resignation. Michael Dervan
Ulster Orchestra - Thierry Fischer at the Ulster Hall, Belfast
Mendelssohn - Overture A Midsummer Night's Dream, Rachmaninov - Piano Concerto No 3, Copland - Appalachian Spring, Smetana - From Bohemia's Woods and Meadows
Mendelssohn was dreaming uneasy dreams in this performance; Fischer gave us spooky, malevolent fairies, with the eerie wind interjections in the middle section projected sharply and the violins near the start suggesting the buzzing of angry wasps rather than the flutter of gossamer wings.
There was anger too in the stamping brass chords which accompanied the rustics' dance. It's one way of doing it, I suppose.
The concerto was played with more warmth and benefited from the commanding pianism of Barry Douglas. He has given us this work before but there was an extra degree of poetry in the opening theme and a new quality of brilliant lightness in the quick rhythmic figures which sometimes flicker over the surface of a work which immerses listeners deeply in its own world but whose mood is predominantly languid, even lugubrious.
After this the primary colours of the Copland came as a relief. This was an excellent performance, clean-cut and incisive, with an innocent magic in the quieter episodes. Even if one finds Copland resistible when he's in one of his folksy moods, he does have the ability to make very simple musical material seem fresh.
But the highlight of the concert was the Smetana. The brass interjections near the opening threatened to become overbearing, but the pacing, style and spirit of this enigmatic work were all just right. Fischer always seems at home in the Czech repertoire, and there was drama and imagination in his account of this enigmatic work. Dermot Gault
Our Lady's Choral Society & Orchestra/Ó Duinn at the NCH, Dublin
Vaughan Williams - Serenade to Music, Handel - Zadok the Priest, Verdi - Laudi alla Vergine Maria, Verdi - Te Deum, Elgar - The Music Makers
Our Lady's Choral Society began its 60th anniversary celebrations at the National Concert Hall on Wednesday with a programme that reaffirmed long-standing connections and established one new one.
The society's annual performances of Handel's Messiah are a popular fixture in the musical calendar, and both Verdi's Requiem and Elgar's Dream of Gerontius have long held a special place in the choir's repertoire.
Wednesday's programme turned to smaller works by these composers; Handel's coronation anthem, Zadok the Priest, two of Verdi's Four Sacred Pieces, and Elgar's 1912 choral ode, The Music Makers. The concert also included the choir's first performance of a work by Vaughan Williams, the Shakespeare setting Serenade to Music he wrote for the conductor Henry J. Wood in 1938.
The evening's largest work, The Music Makers, sets a text by Arthur O'Shaughnessy which forms something of a barrier to many listeners. It includes the memorable lines "We are the music makers/And we are the dreamers of dreams" but also the risible "With wonderful deathless ditties/We build up the world's great cities." Musically, with its prominent quotations from the composer's earlier works, the piece is, in Hollywood terms, a kind of sequel.
And just as with many a Hollywood sequel, the later fabrication doesn't manage to make as strong an impression as the original, though the nostalgia of reliving the past is an obvious attraction to the work's admirers, and the craft of the exercise is every bit as fine as you would expect from a composer of Elgar's achievements.
Ó Duinn took a business-like approach to the music, and the contributions of the contralto soloist, Deirdre Cooling-Nolan, were solidly caring, though the conductor did allow the orchestra to mask the voice rather too often.
The choir's sopranos and altos sounded youthful and fresh-voiced. The men were as eager in manner, though their roughness of tone under pressure was emphasised because of their disproportionately low numbers.
The two pieces by Verdi, Laudi alla Vergine Maria and Te Deum, showed both strengths and weaknesses in the choral contributions, and Handel's Zadok the Priest, using trombones in the orchestra, had plenty of energy but of a slightly too scattered variety.
The most rewarding match of music and performance was found in the rapt moments of the Vaughan Williams Serenade, the singers seeming to be lifted by the delicate beauty of a work new to them. Michael Dervan
