Irish Timeswriters review a selection of recent events
David Connolly (organ)
St Michael’s Church, Dún Laoghaire
Tournemire– Improvisation sur le Te Deum. Bach– Allein Gott in der Höh' sei Ehr BWV 662. Clérambault– Suite du deuxième ton. Mendelssohn– Sonata in C minor Op 65 No 2. Peeters– Suite Modale.
This second recital in the annual summer-long series on the Rieger organ at St Michael’s Dun Laoghaire featured series director and St Michael’s director of music, David Connolly. He is currently balancing these responsibilities, and his performing and teaching, with a PhD on the relationship between old church chant and the larger-than-life French organ music of the symphonic school from the late 19th century and into the 20th.
He opened his nicely diverse programme with the chant- based Improvisation sur le Te Deum by the lesser-known French composer Charles Tournemire. He would have been lesser-known still had he not made phonograph recordings of this and four other improvisations in 1930, nine years before his death. Then in 1958 his former pupil Maurice Duruflé listened to the recordings and wrote down the improvisations.
As Connolly demonstrated with his lively but intense performance, Tournemire’s approach was flamboyant, his mood an almost angry one. Connolly followed this with the contrasting delicacy of one of Bach’s settings (BWV 662) of Allein Gott in der Höh’ sei Her (“To God alone on high be glory”), the original chorale melody conspicuously demarcated from Bach’s gentle backdrop by volume and by tremolo.
The Suite du deuxième ton by Bach’s French contemporary Louis-Nicolas Clérambault was the second, and ended up being the last, of an intended cycle featuring a suite for every key. Written in 1710, it looks both backwards – to the Renaissance, in the form of a jaunty, busy movement featuring crumhorn – and to the future, with a couple of chords in the opening movement that, intriguingly, would not have sounded out of place in the Big Band era.
After bicentenary homage to Mendelssohn with the second of his six great sonatas for organ, Connolly closed with the 1938 Suite Modale by Flors Peeters who gave the inaugural St Michael's recital in 1974. MICHAEL DUNGAN
The Fire Room/When the Hunter Returns
Project Arts Centre
The Gaiety School of Acting’s director Patrick Sutton is to be commended for his continued commitment to commissioning new plays by young writers for the school’s annual showcase. However, this practice actually doubles the theatrical risk, as it means that both the acting and the plays themselves are yet untested in the public eye. Unfortunately, in the case of this double-bill, written by Lisa Tierney-Keogh and Lally Katz, one play succeeds far better both as a dramatic piece and as a showcase for the talents of the graduating actors.
Tierney-Keogh’s hostel-horror/terrorist tragi-comedy The Fire Room is high on sex, adrenalin, expletives, and explosives, but the dramatic peak is reached in the first 20 minutes of the hour-long play, and Patrick Sutton’s production descends into a veritable shouting match that does no favours to Tierney-Keogh’s writing or to the 10 actors, who struggle to hold on to their various international accents.
Tierney-Keogh has evidently given a huge amount of consideration to creating contemporary characters that the actors can relate too, but by placing the emphasis so strongly on psychological realism she has actually done them a disservice, generating hysteria rather than emotional catharsis and highlighting vocal and, in particular, accent weaknesses.
Lally Katz’s absurdist morality play, meanwhile, challenges the actors to move out of the comfort zone of psychological realism on a number of levels.Characters communicate in non-sequiturs, off-stage performers are called on to create atmosphere with music and song, and stylised movement allows the actors to demonstrate their physical as well as vocal and emotive talent.
Playing the most coherent characters on stage, Camille Ross and Simon Stewart in particular distinguish themselves. However, the entire ensemble is to be commended for its willingness to invest so fully in the collectivity that Liam Halligan’s beautiful imagistic production demands. This showcases their willingness to sacrifice ego for the sake of the production as a whole, a vital skill for the collaborative nature of the theatre.
Indeed, perhaps the greatest compliment that can be paid, is that When the Hunter Returns is worth seeing on its own merit. Until Sat SARA KEATING
