Martin Adams reviews the RTE NSO at Friday's concert in the National Concert Hall.
Cassard, RTÉ NSO/Markson
NCH, Dublin
Verdi - La forza del destino Overture
Mozart - Piano Concerto in C K503
Strauss - Also sprach Zarathustra
Friday's concert was a striking start to the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra's season.
Although the programme followed a standard format it never felt routine, partly because the pieces represented three strong, very different concepts of musical drama but above all because the performances made the most of those individualities.
Verdi's overture to La forza del destino can easily sound fragmented. In this performance Gerhard Markson and the RTÉ NSO made the most of its contrasts of material, timed everything well, and characterised each idea vividly.
Similar points could be made about Mozart's Piano Concerto in C K503 except that in the first movement the orchestral playing was sometimes wanting in definition.
However, it was Philippe Cassard's playing of the solo part that drove and defined this performance. It was refreshing to hear him, even in the slow movement, consistently eschewing the elegance that has become something of an albatross to the composer's reputation.
The character of material and the composer's Allegretto marking place the finale in the rondo grazioso category, like the last movements of several of Mozart's violin sonatas and Beethoven's piano sonatas.
I have never heard it played as fast or as intensely as Cassard did. The result was risky to the point that he made several slips, but it was always enjoyable and wholesome in its respect for Mozart's dramatic powers.
Also sprach Zarathustra epitomises Strauss's powers as a manipulator of programmatic techniques.
The players of the RTÉ NSO responded warmly to its technical virtuosity, to its astonishing range of material and colour, and to its calculated complexity and sensuality.
Above all it was Gerhard Markson's judgement of pacing that made this highly sectionalised work hold together, that made its opulent range of detail hold one's attention.
Stars
Sugar Club, Dublin
Davin O'Dwyer
The Canadian music scene is beginning to hit critical mass, and Montreal is earning the dreaded "new Seattle" tag.
Extraordinary, distinctive music is being created by bands like Godspeed You! Black Emperor, the Dears, A Silver Mt Zion and the Arcade Fire (who only the other week electrified the Electric Picnic) and Stars are the latest Montreal group to attract a buzz.
They share the characteristics that define the scene: expert musicianship developed over years of playing for playing's sake; gorgeous melodies tinged with discordant noise and feedback; and lots of members.
Stars line up with seven musicians, as do the Arcade Fire, while Godspeed often feature 10, and Toronto's magnificent collective Broken Social Scene (who share bassist Evan Cranley with Stars) frequently boast 11 musicians. Like much of Canada itself, the music is initially superficially familiar, before gradually revealing its own unique character.
The performance starts slowly, sounding like Belle & Sebastian with added guitar. The brilliantly named lead singer Torquil Campbell is engaging and bubbling with energy, guitarist and singer Amy Millan expertly strikes some poses, moustachioed bassist Cranley looks suitably louche.
But the music takes time to catch up with the performance, and it is only five or six songs in that the pressure is raised with some of the stand-out tracks from their latest album, Set Yourself on Fire, including Your Ex-lover is Dead and Reunion.
Eventually the distortion and noise play an equal part to the pitch-perfect pop, and the sound of Montreal is unmistakeable.
But while the energy from the stage is palpable, the plush seats and spaced-out vibe of the Sugar Club acts as a barrier for the crowd. Pogo-dancing can be tricky when you're sitting down.
Stars are a thrilling example of what can be produced when a music scene is allowed to develop with a lot of mutual support and few commercial pressures. The result is enthralling and vital.
Opera Theatre Company/Curnyn
The Helix, Dublin
Michael Dervan
Monteverdi - The Coronation of Poppea
In Monteverdi's last opera, The Coronation of Poppea, the love of the Roman emperor Nero and his mistress Poppea is allowed to triumph.
The Nero of the opera seems hardly any blacker a character than the individuals who surround him, the manipulative Poppea or her husband Ottone, who, spurred on by Nero's wife Ottavia, attempts in female disguise to murder the emperor.
For her new Opera Theatre Company production, which opened at The Helix on Friday, director Annilese Miskimmon will have nothing of this apparent dilution of the Nero of public perception.
Her Nero is dissolute and depraved. She confronts him with the bath in which Seneca has committed suicide, so that he can dip his hand in the blood and smear it on himself. If she could at some stage have delivered an even gorier Penn and Teller illusion, it's hard to imagine she would not have been tempted.
This is a production which is premised on exaggeration.
Fortune, Virtue and Love are got up like some of the wilder creations from a fashion catwalk.
Nero and Poppea posture and contort and tease like young hopefuls at an audition for a low-budget porn movie. There's even a suggestion of homoerotic interest for Nero.
Miskimmon fleshes out her high-camp vision of the fate of what her introductory note calls "the terrible twosome" with finely-controlled detail and genuine theatrical flair.
Nicky Shaw's designs, abstract set and a mixture of modern and not-so-modern costumes with lots of déshabillé, all resourcefully lit by Simon Corder, match her every step of the way.
The problem with the evening is that Monteverdi's music doesn't quite support so simplistic a view of the characters, and conductor Christian Curnyn and his cast by and large don't manage to hold things in a balance where both views can have sway.
The possibility of such an outcome is clear from the contributions of Neil Jenkins as the pink, high-heeled nurse Arnalta, whose every word is not only articulate and telling, but whose vocal line is also stylish, confident and musically true.
Alan Ewing's Seneca, grave and imposing, is hardly less fine.
But the flighty, driven Nero of counter tenor Stephen Wallace is more than faintly preposterous (the voice itself seems fine, but the delivery often simply tumbles over itself), and the Ottone of William Towers (another counter tenor) lacks weight and presence.
The controlling physical allure of Allison Cook's Poppea is not consistently caught in her singing, though she does have moments where everything gels.
Rebekah Coffey does an appealing turn as the arch manipulator Love, handling her routines on a scooter with impressive smoothness, and Sinéad Campbell is nimbly responsive as the caught in the middle figure of Drusilla.
Doreen Curran's Ottavia gets some of the finest music but doesn't seem quite able to make the most of it.
The period instruments of the Irish Baroque Orchestra - strings only, with a rich continuo section, and Curnyn directing from the harpsichord - make an appealing sound. But in the dry acoustic of The Helix's theatre they don't manage to counterpart either the emotional or dramatic vividness of the staging.
OTC's The Coronation of Poppea is at The Helix tomorrow, before touring Belfast, Galway and Derry. Details: 01-6794962.
