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Opera Ireland
Gaiety Theatre, Dublin
Strauss - Ariadne auf Naxos
Opera Ireland's production of Richard Strauss's Ariadne auf Naxos, directed by Dieter Kaegi and designed by Stefanie Pasterkamp, updates the work to the late 20th century.
A motley and indolent group of individuals are gathered for a house party in a black room. The Composer (Kinga Dobay) resorts to cocaine (snorted off the lid of a piano), photographs are taken with a Polaroid camera held away from the eye as if it has the benefit of a digital display, Zerbinetta (Mari Moriya) changes outfits in the room, but a red rug is held up to keep her from view.
On the one hand, the stage is populated by apparently dissolute characters, yet on the other, modesty prevails. More significantly, the power relationships of the original work and the motivations of the original characters fade without trace. It's one of those nonsensical farragos which seem to take up far too high a percentage of Opera Ireland's output.
Sadly, the clarity and detail of Strauss's lean orchestration are not well served by conductor Walter Kobéra, whose musical approach seems altogether too generalised, and it's only in the big sings from Zerbinetta, Ariadne (Alwyn Mellor) and Bacchus (Alan Woodrow), that things come into focus.
Moriya, a clear audience favourite in Dublin, sings with easy spring (though her diction leaves a lot to be desired), and Woodrow gets through the necessary business (though in a way that's short on vocal appeal). Mellor is an altogether more compassionate presence, rather too bemused, perhaps, until Strauss sets her soaring on high.
Fortunately, the most memorable singing comes towards the end of work, which allows the feeling that something gets rescued from this seriously misguided production.
Further performances Tuesday and Friday
Michael Dervan
Clark, Dakin, Clark
Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin
Hugh Wood - Trio for Horn, Violin and Piano Brahms - Horn Trio Op 40
How a composer sometimes strains to break free from tradition was virtually audible in the 1989 Horn Trio by Hugh Wood (b 1932), given as part of this two-work, one-hour recital by horn-player Ian Dakin and siblings Elaine (violin) and David (piano) Clark.
Wood doesn't seem to settle into what he really wants to say until well into the long first movement. Here long, lyrical exchanges between horn and violin disclose a musical lineage with deep roots in the English pastoral of Vaughan Williams. It's en route to this, the work's core, that you can hear Wood strenuously integrating other 20th-century influences, notably Schonberg and Stravinsky. The piece is book-ended with a hard-hitting, dissonant energy, sometimes harsh, sometimes less so, for example in a fleet sequence of fugal passages.
The work received a committed, worthwhile reading from the Clarks and - taking the horn part's more jagged technical demands comfortably in his stride - Dakin.
They paired this unfamiliar piece with the beautiful Trio by Brahms. It, too, has a soft, emotional core in the form of its introspective third movement, a quiet lament upon the death of his mother in 1865, the year that he composed it.
Brahms, however, is more convincing and accomplished than Wood in the surrounding music, including his lively Scherzo and the positive energy of a spirited hunting gigue to conclude.
Here again the Clarks and Dakin gave a polished account of what was frankly by some distance the superior music in the programme.
Michael Dungan
Bennink, Moore and Holhouser
JJ Smyth's, Dublin
Barely stopping short of using the diverse anatomies of his rapt audience for percussive fodder, Dutch drummer, Han Bennink brought his legendary playfulness to Camden Street and transformed a night of deluge in Dublin into an oasis of free improvisation, regularly reined in by a freight of intuitive set pieces aired by himself and his play dates, Michael Moore and Will Holshouser.
This was music to be variously gasped at, chuckled to and seduced by, as it wended its way through backwaters and byways that paid their respects to everyone from the Pink Panther to Charles Mingus and Dexter Gordon, with just a tincture of rustic Cajun tossed into the mix on one occasion.
Bennink's modus vivendi is evidently one of live and let live, and his unconditional openness to the endless possibilities of Michael Moore's clarinet and saxophone, not to mention those of Will Holshouser's jagged-edged piano accordion was a master class in musical inventiveness that came with few preconditions.
With nothing more than a snare drum, the occasional stray dishcloth and his own four hyperactive limbs, Bennink's panoply of rhythmic hiccups and thunderclaps sometimes drove his compañeros but mostly sidled up alongside them, converging and diverging from clarinet and accordion, like a sinusoidal wave utterly confident of its destination.
Californian Michael Moore's hunger for inventiveness was what probably lured him to the Netherlands way back in the 1980s where he encountered Bennink through the Instant Composers Pool.
His bass clarinet and soprano sax often started out, amoeba-like, burrowing into a particular phrase until he'd got the measure of it, and then metastasised into countless offshoots, while Holshouser dug deep into the bellows for just the right tincture of dissonance to keep them both as far from the straight and narrow as possible. Bennink, meanwhile, ebbed and flowed, muting and amplifying his boisterousness as the mood dictated.
If anything, it was the mood that occasionally suffered from Bennink's enthusiasms, particularly towards the back end of the trio's performance, when Holshouser and Moore unbuttoned their musical shirts in earnest.
While the music languished in a shady bayou, where space was as important as sound, Bennink's insistent rhythms were inclined to harangue Moore and Holshouser back towards full throttle, when their measured pacing was precisely what the long, shadow-drenched room of JJ Smyth's cried out for.
Still, for sheer ingenious interpretation of musical phrases borrowed from Carlos Jobim, Charles Mingus, Henry Mancini and Laurie Anderson, not to mention Bennink, Moore and Holshouser's own intricately-woven repertoire, this was a night well worth getting soaked to the bone for.
Siobhán Long
