Irish Times writers give their verdict...

Sexton, RTÉ NSO/Altschuler
NCH, Dublin

Martin Adams

Rossini - Thieving Magpie Overture. Tchaikovsky/Glazunov - Souvenir d'un lieu cher. Chabrier - Joyeuse marche. Dukas - The Sorcerer's Apprentice

In several concerts over recent years, strong music-making has been produced by the combination of Vladimir Altschuler's conducting and the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra's playing. Tuesday's lunchtime concert, the last in the RTÉ NSO's contribution to the summer lunchtime series, was true to form.

One of the highlights was the always-listening accompaniment of Tchaikovsky's Souvenir d'un lieu cher, played in Glazunov's arrangement of the original for piano and violin. Sarah Sexton was a soloist with whom any orchestra could feel confident.

There were so many things to enjoy about her playing. Her tone was always beautiful. Her long-breathed phrasing was aided by a variety of vibrato, right down to none at all (all too rare nowadays), that always suited the emphasis of the moment. She seemed to have all the time in the world - a flexibility with rhythm that produced delightful give-and-take between soloist and orchestra. All that and a subtle range of colour created a profoundly expressive performance of this impeccable, salon-style gem.

The orchestral works on the programme were consistently impressive. Rossini's Thieving Magpie Overture and Chabrier's Joyeuse marche had a relaxed precision that made every phrase, every sequence of events work together to create authority and character.

One of the most impressive aspects of the playing was that flexible momentum that comes when rhythm is sprung rather than driven. This paid enormous dividends in Dukas's The Sorcerer's Apprentice, where narrative qualities were evident and precise, without that cheapness of effect that comes from going for the jugular. I heard details of texture that are often passed over; and the performance achieved that most-difficult of musical effects, the truly purposeful, long-range accelerando.

Series continues at 1.05pm on Tuesday at the NCH, with the RTÉ Concert Orchestra, violinist Elizabeth Cooney and conductor Laurent Wagner

Waterfront Wasteland/
Medea Material/
Landscape with Argonauts
Project Upstairs

Gerry Colgan

Heiner Muller, who died in 1996, is regarded as the most influential German playwright of his time. He served an apprenticeship with Bertolt Brecht, and went on to create an avant garde theatre with a new exploration of reality in which his influences were Kafka, Artaud, Eliot and many others who wrote on the edge.

Loose Canon company is producing this extraordinary triptych to a depth that few others could equal. The first panel has Medea and a maid exchanging jagged, repetitive dialogue. Medea repeatedly asks where her husband Jason is, and is told he is with King Creon's daughter. The staccato mix of silences and words is unsettling, leaving a sense of menace.

Next, Jason tells his wife of his intention to marry the princess, and the horror begins. Through Medea's words and mimes we see the cruel death of Creon and his daughter, and the vicious murder of the two sons of Jason and Medea. This segment ends when Jason crawls back on stage, a ruined creature.

The final panel is a monologue by a seated man telling of other horrors, of war and death, in the most intense and poetic of words, with the force and universality of, say, Picasso's Guernica in a different medium. It leaves no doubt as to the power of the writer.

This is not an easy work to absorb, nor is it intended to be. But, for one hour, it rivets its audience, and the acting by Deirdre Roycroft, Karl Quinn, Kevin Morley and Barry McGovern is so committed as to sustain the production's blend of metaphor and realism. The engine that drives it all is director Jason Byrne, leading from the front as usual.

Runs to July 30th