IBO Chamber Soloists, Ruiten/ Huggett
St Ann's Church, Dublin
For this colourful and fascinating exploration of pre-18th-century Shakespearean music, the Irish Baroque Orchestra's Chamber Soloists, under their artistic director, Monica Huggett, were joined by the distinguished Dutch soprano, Lenneke Ruiten.
Items from the Bard's own lifetime included the anonymous Willow Song he appropriated for Othello, two apposite lute solos (played by Richard Sweeney), and settings of Where the Bee Sucks and Full Fathom Five by a younger contemporary, lutenist Robert Johnson. The bulk of the programme, however, drew on music composed for two revivals of The Tempest in 1667 and 1674, and on Purcell's score for The Fairy Queen, a free adapation of A Midsummer Night's Dream that was a landmark of decadence in Restoration theatre. The songs by Johnson, as well as those by the later composers, Pelham Humphrey and John Bannister, are straightforward and freshly tuneful settings. The text is still positively the richest ingredient.
So intensely complex was her expression that Ruiten, who is a noted interpreter of romantic lieder, seemed to sing these plain ditties for more than their musical worth. It was rather with the invigorating histrionics of Pietro Reggio's Arise, ye subterranean winds and the more cogent musical rhetoric of Purcell that her versatile artistry was best revealed.
Purcell's skeletal accompaniments were fleshed out with style and discretion by Malcolm Proud at the harpsichord, although where I was sitting his keyboard contributions to the full instrumental items might have been less prominent, and the bass line more so. Perhaps significantly, then, the most coherent string textures occurred without continuo, in a beautifully muted See, even Night herself is here, from The Fairy Queen.
True to form, Huggett inspired playing that brimmed with enjoyment. There was particular relish to a zany Curtain Tune, by Matthew Locke, and his engagingly unpredictable dances came off with verve. ANDREW JOHNSTONE
Mrs Whippy
Liberty Hall, Dublin
Cecelia Ahern, the bestselling author, TV producer and darling of film adapters, has moved into theatre, for there are no more worlds to conquer.
Much has been made of her successes or shortcomings as a novelist, but anyone curious to learn of her facility as a playwright will have to wait a little longer. Mrs Whippy began life as a first-person novella (written for the Open Door adult literacy series) and reaches the stage, with minimal alteration, as a first-person monologue.
Given that the protagonist, Emelda, lives a life of alarming isolation, it is hard to see how else the story might have been adapted. Abandoned by her monstrous husband for a Russian lap-dancer, vilified by her five sons, frozen out by her adulterous friend and left to converse with only the memory of her dead mother, Emelda is more void than woman, filling her emptiness with ice cream.
Marion O'Dwyer, a personable actress who gives an appealing, self-deprecating performance, brightens with every kick-start to Emelda's self-confidence, no matter how regularly it splutters out. But just as Emelda's dessert fetish is a compulsion presented as cutesiness, Ahern's writing is similarly inclined to binge. "Every moment of my life is marked by ice cream," Emelda tells us and, lest we miss the point, we get an endless catalogue: passion fruit flavours her wedding day, strawberry and cream dribbles down the honeymoon, mint and chocolate for her mother, orange Popsicles for her father, Mississippi Mud Slide for her first major coronary, and so on.
It's a device intended to endear, but its overstatement weakens the character's emotional credibility and even her litany of children feels schematic, so much so that it barely registers that her eldest is in prison for attempted murder. Much like the Oprah episodes Emelda consumes, these are largely bad-hair-day setbacks that can be overcome with a little gumption and no major calorie concessions. Finding gainful employment packing bags in a supermarket, and striking up a thing with the local ice cream vendor (who is understandably smooth), Emelda ultimately discovers that she does not need a man, or ice cream, to validate her. She needs a man who is the personification of ice cream.
With little room to manoeuvre within the text, director Michael Scott injects quirky theatrical devices wherever possible (an angry fridge spits out food, a dinky constellation of cones descends from above). O'Dwyer judges the tone adroitly, making the play's most affecting moment, Emelda's humiliation, more poignant for not overdoing it. Together they present a depressive woman in a bleak situation who is spirited somehow into an innocuous fantasy. It's an attractively packaged, insubstantial indulgence that slips down easy, bypasses the heart and goes straight to the hips. Until Nov 29 PETER CRAWLEY
Quartet New Generation
Coach House, Dublin Castle
Quartet New Generation have no qualms about being a self-consciously fresh concept in chamber music: four women in silky black cocktail dresses equipped with a vast array of recorders and a mind-stretching repertoire. The quartet's two Austrian and two German members got together in 2002 when they were students in Amsterdam. They are now making their first tour of Ireland as invitees of Music Network.
Their programme consists partly of late Renaissance works: a courtly Pavan by John Dowland, a conservatively intellectual madrigal by Cipriano de Rore, and an engrossing fantasia by Samuel Scheidt. There are effective borrowings too from the polyphony of later generations: the final, unfinished Contrapunctus from Bach's Art of Fugue, and a neo-Palestrinian Vexilla regis by Bruckner.
The players constantly reassign themselves among the four parts, and take it in turns to chat informatively to the audience while the others prepare the next set of instruments - which range from the pocket-sized to a sub-contrabass of totem-pole proportions.
An absorbing attention to details of timbre, articulation and architecture in the older pieces is offset by four outgoing contemporary works, three of them written specially for this group. Paul Moravec's Mortal Flesh (2007) is a nifty take on the hymn-tune, Picardy, that calls for each member to play on five successively smaller instruments in as many minutes. Petros Ovsepyan's Arak (2008) moves from mesmeric cacophony to statuesque performance art, while Chiel Meijering's Sitting Ducks (1991) recalls jazz, Messiaen, and pre-digital electronics. Most vivid of all, however, is Woiciech Blecharz's Airlines (2008), in which the instruments are overblown, underblown, kissed, tapped, whispered into, spoken into, and played without mouthpieces.
The result compellingly fuses the novelties of digitally created sonic art with the inimitable excitement of a real-time acoustic performance. Until Nov 6 ANDREW JOHNSTONE
