Pipeworks Festival, Various venues, Dublin
Choral music has been the major focus of the opening days of the Pipeworks Festival, formerly and more cumbersomely known as the Dublin International Organ and Choral Festival.
The festival has brought Dublin's three cathedral choirs together in the past, but never for as exotic a programme as was presented at St Patrick's Cathedral on Friday. The festival is exploring music from France and Belgium, and Friday's offering was intended as a tightly interwoven sequence.
The three choirs sang separately and together. They shared the honours equally in Maurice Duruflé's Quatre Motets sur des themes grègoriens, joining together for the first, and each later singing a single motet from a different point in the cathedral.
Dupré, Fauré, Poulenc, Frank Martin and Widor all made appearances, too, and after the interval the choirs combined again under Peter Barley for the evening's climax, the rarely-heard Mass, Op 130, by Joseph Jongen (1873-1953), the best-known Belgian composer of the 20th century.
Predictably, the best moments in what felt to be a very bitty evening were provided by the massed voices. Barley's stylish and confident handling of the Jongen was well supported by the organ playing of David Leigh, and if the work still seems rather out of its time, harking back to an earlier age (it was written in the mid-1940s), this performance showed it to be an effective vehicle for fine choral singing and organ playing.
The singing of the combined choirs was, however, quite eclipsed at Christ Church Cathedral on Saturday by the performances the Chamber Choir of Mannheim's Musikhochschule gave under its founding conductor, Georg Grün. Grün offered another programme with rather too many items, which jumped from style to style in an effort to ensure there would be no lack of contrast. The pieces were individually and multi-lingually introduced by members of the choir, and the technical security of the singing (with a firmness and resonance from the men that many an Irish conductor would envy) and the sheer finesse of the delivery were a consistent pleasure.
That pleasure had its price, however. Grün and his singers seem to have conceived their performances as a kind of choral demonstration in which the singing was allowed to take priority over matters of musical style and substance.
The generous representation of music by living composers (Uros Krek, Eric Whitacre, Morten Lauridsen, Tarik O'Regan, Vytautas Barkauskas) seems to have been chosen with the same eye to self-aggrandisement that guided a pianist such as Shura Cherkassky in the choice of encores. And the music by familiar names, from Schütz to Brahms and Debussy, presented itself in unfamiliar ways, like the movements of an athletic person constrained by clothes that don't quite fit.
The greatest mis-match of all came in Clytus Gottwald's arrangement of one of Wagner's Wesendonk Lieder, Träume, which Grün handled as if without reference to the original.
This was one of those evenings where the greatest pleasure was to be had by concentrating on the performances to the partial exclusion of the music.
Sunday evening's organ recital at St Michael's, DúLaoghaire, was given by the multi-talented Hungarian musician Bálint Karosi.
Karosi, who took the top prize at the last Dublin International Organ Competition in 2002, has also won prizes as a clarinettist, and offered a work of his own in his Dún Laoghaire programme as well as an improvisation on a theme (St Patrick's Breastplate) shown to him for the first time at the end of the evening.
He was at his extrovert best in two works by Bach, a breezy performance of the Prelude and Fugue in G, BWV541, and a strongly-projected account of the Fantasia and Fugue in G minor, BWV542.
His own study, Flutes, is an exercise in minimalist intertwinings, with something of that aura of suggestiveness that made some of Raymond Deane's 1970s explorations in this area so fascinating.
His improvisation was par for the course in being too long, but he did enjoy creating opportunities to show that his feet are nearly as nimble as his fingers, and he also worked himself successfully into some unexpectedly witty terrain.
The Pipeworks Festival continues until Friday (01-6337392)
- Michael Dervan
Casanova's Limp, Bewley's Café Theatre
The real SR Plant, author of Buridan's Ass at Bewley's last year, has, in my opinion, yet to stand up. Can he really be living in a farmhouse in France, alone save for an extensive collection of stuffed animals? Whatever, he has again provided a new comedy for Bewley's lunchtime theatre, and retains a goodly share of inventive wit.
We find Casanova on his deathbed toward the end of the 18th century, left without an audible line of dialogue to enliven his passing. That is more than compensated for by two women, a former "castrato" singer and a youngish courtesan, drawn to his side by past memories and present venality. They open the book on their former lover and, by the time they close it, we have learned much about his conquests and practices.
It is not without interest to learn that Casanova believed in safe sex, and went nowhere without a supply of decorative love-gloves, or early condoms. (He once apparently attempted suicide with a necklace of them, loaded with shot, around his neck.)
The eponymous limp was acquired from his less-than-athletic leaps from bedroom windows. When the good times had rolled over, he was left to the selfless devotion of former lovers to care for him during his final decline.
The script veers from witty irreverence to mere naughtiness, but has a sufficient share of laughs to sustain the hour or so of its tenure. It also provides the material for Marion O'Dwyer and Amelia Crowley to turn in sparkling performances that milk every double entendre and nuance for the last drop of their comedy content. Michael Andrews is the near-corpse with a final kick, and Michael James Ford directs.
Runs until July 9, 1.10pm
-Gerry Colgan
Billy Corgan, Ambassador Theatre, Dublin
It helps if you're even halfway dysfunctional to make it to the top, get knobbled, crash down, start all over again, and begin to claw your way back up. In Smashing Pumpkins, Billy Corgan was the frontman in every sense of the word - his band, his lyrics, his sensibilities, his aesthetic, his flaws, his genuine outsider status all provided the constituent parts that made them, in their heyday (a five-year period from 1993 to 1998), one of the most exciting, beautifully strange rock bands around.
Corgan is now a bona fide solo act (he, that is, and a few band members that make up his touring and recording unit), which means he stands or falls on and around what is a most singular vision. The title of his new album, The Future Embrace, is an obvious indication as to where he has set his sights, but nothing - genuinely nothing - prepares you for the stage act that showcases the music.
The stage set is virtually antiseptic, a scientist's laboratory given a design makeover by Apple and HR Giger; the instruments are like cable-tidied metallic stalagmites; and thin people dressed in black operate them. Behind the band are wall-to-wall video tiles upon which the future of rock show design is well and truly grafted. It's incredibly impressive in a way that the music is not.
Despite the swell of a sold-out show and Corgan's alien-clone persona - not to mention his stature as an exceptional lead guitarist - the music mostly lacks depth and soul, and occasionally smacks of a routine run-through. It's quite possible that kinks in the pacing will be ironed out, also, as well as a curious lack of communication between Corgan and his fervent fans.
In the meantime, however, we can only reflect in gobsmacked wonder at the set design, and bemoan the paucity of same in the music. It should be the other way around, of course, and why it wasn't remains something Billy Corgan needs to worry about.
- Tony Clayton-Lea
