DAVIN O'DWYERreviews Animal Collectiveat Tripod, Dublin and MICHAEL DERVANreviews Welchman/ICO Houghat the NCH, Dervan while MICHAEL DUNGANreviews Vienna Mozart Trioat City Hall in Dublin
Animal Collective
Tripod, Dublin
Animal Collective have a pretty mixed track record when it comes to shows in Tripod. Their November 2007 show was beset by technical problems and vocalist Avey Tare's flu, leaving a lot of fans disappointed. Then when the band were due to play there last May, their van broke down in England, they missed a ferry, and arrived so late their show had to be hastily rearranged in the much smaller Whelans, leaving a lot of fans disappointed. But that Whelans show instantly became the stuff of legend, one of those "Were you there?" gigs that crop up every few years or so. Since then, they released their universally acclaimed latest album, Merriweather Post Pavilion, adding to the intense anticipation for this show. But given their famously idiosyncratic live performances, there was every chance a lot of fans could again be left disappointed.
Bands don't get much more esoteric than Animal Collective — pleasing crowds, in the conventional sense of giving them what they want, is not something they care to specialise in. At times, with their extended, distorted jams and glowing, kaleidoscopic light show, this performance was more like performance art than anything as conventional as a concert. The band might play their most beloved songs, but don't expect faithful renderings of the recorded versions, or anything as orthodox as a crowd-pleaser. My Girls, Fireworksand For Reverend Greenwere all given astonishing, transformative reworkings that worked up the crowd, but made them work too — familiarity and accessibility are not valuable currencies in the world of Animal Collective.
There were periods of dull self-indulgence, when the energy was lost and something like boredom began to settle on the crowd, but soon Panda Bear (aka Noah Lennox) and Geologist (Brian Weitz) would conjure another wave of delirious sounds from behind their decks, and as quickly again the audience was swept away. The phenomenal success of this resolutely avant garde, experimental band is one of those heartening, curious occurrences that can't be predicted or easily explained, but is easily understood when you're immersed in their sound. They've made challenging expectations into an artform, and on this night, at least, it was a triumph. DAVIN O'DWYER
Welchman, ICO/Hough
NCH, Dublin
Mozart– Piano Concerto in C K467. Mendelssohn– Piano Concerto No 1.
Stephen Hough– The Loneliest Wilderness. Mendelssohn– Italian Symphony.
It’s not yet clear whether the ongoing recession will slow down the Irish Chamber Orchestra’s expansion from a strings-only band into a fully-fledged chamber orchestra with wind as well as strings. But this concert under guest director Stephen Hough gave a good indication of what will be lost should the process of expansion stall.
Hough, who hasn’t directed any of Ireland’s orchestras before, showed himself to be as thoroughly invigorating in his new role as he is at the keyboard. The first half of the evening found him in both roles at once, directing concertos by Mozart and Mendelssohn with sensitivity and vivacity.
His handling of Mozart’s Concerto in C, K467, was clean-cut, driven with a neatly relaxed energy in the outer movements, the famous central Andante swelling and sighing with an atmospheric hush.
Mozart was 29 when he wrote the C major Concerto. Mendelssohn was all of seven years younger when he wrote his Concerto in G minor, a piece that’s dangerously florid, the fast movements written with apparently irrepressible high spirits, the Andante conceived with a romantically melting heart. Hough has the fingers keep the vertiginous rush of notes under control and the spirit to do the music full justice. And on this occasion his gentleness impressed every bit as much as his showmanship.
The ICO's principal cellist Juliet Welchman was the soloist in Hough's own The Loneliest Wilderness, composed in New York in the fateful month of September 2001. It's a rather rambling mood piece in which the harmonic palette is quite narrow and yet, in spite of that limitation, the music never quite achieved sufficient focus.
The closing performance of Mendelssohn's ItalianSymphony succeeded where many another has fallen short. The high-speed demands of the Saltarello finale often fail to provide the climactic effect that's required. Hough's was a performance that went from strength to strength, and there was no weakening in the delivery of the closing movement, which bubbled with an energy that seemed both infectious and irrepressible. MICHAEL DERVAN
Vienna Mozart Trio
City Hall, Dublin
Mozart– Piano Trio in B flat K 502. Dvorak– Piano Trio in E minor Op 90 (Dumky)
A whole century of style and idea separates the two works presented by the Vienna Mozart Trio at Dublin’s City Hall.
Mozart penned the B flat Trio K 502 in 1886 at a time when his fame as both a composer and performer of piano concertos was its peak. So it's not surprising that this trio features a concerto-like prominence in the piano which is very much primus inter pares(with the cello a distant tertius). It is a masterpiece of classical style: three movements (fast-slow-fast), graceful in demeanour, balanced and logical in structure.
The structure in Dvorak's DumkyTrio of 1891 is wholly different, with each of six movements featuring sharp alterations between fast and slow, an idea derived from the old Slavic dumkaform of folksong. This gives a strong folk flavour to a trio which has been called a sonnet-sequence.
The Vienna Mozart Trio – made up of Auner family members Irina (piano) Daniel (violin), and Diethard (cello) – made less of the style gap than you might have expected. Although the first movement of the Mozart had a strong feeling of classical purity, thereafter, beginning with their heart-felt Larghettomovement, there was a fairly romantic level of personal expression. It came as a surprise but worked well, led by Irina Auner who sparkled in the piano's pre-eminent role.
This openly emotional romanticism was more at home in the Dvorak. The Trio established a gentle intimacy in each movement’s slow, thoughtful sections which were then broken up by the quick, rustic oom-cha-oom-cha passages that characterise the works’s very different means of contrast.
The acoustic bloom beneath the towering cupola of City Hall meant that on occasion – notably in the faster, louder sections of both works – more of the spirit of the music came across than of the detail. But with the natural light streaming in from huge windows into so lovely a space, no one seemed to mind much. MICHAEL DUNGAN
