Critics from The Irish Timesreview the latest shows

Redmond O'Toole (guitar)
NCH, John Field Room

Scarlatti - Sonata in D minor K213.
Moreno Torroba - Suite Castellana.
Bach - Prelude, Fugue and Allegro BWV998.
Rodrigo - Invocación y danza.
Leo Brouwer - La espiral eterna.
Bach - Lute Suite No 2 BWV997.
Albéniz - Asturias.
As guitarists go, Redmond O'Toole is a dreamer. He's something of a pioneer too, having embraced the eight-string Brahms guitar created by instrument-maker David Rubio for Paul Galbraith, one of O'Toole's teachers. Galbraith wanted the extra high and low notes for a Brahms arrangement, hence the name, though it's also sometimes known as the cello guitar because it can be played vertically, like a cello, with a spike on a resonating chamber, which is the approach O'Toole adopts.

O'Toole launched his new CD, Baroque(dedicated to the late Anne Leahy), at Dublin's John Field Room in a recital that framed major works by Bach with more conventional, Spanish-flavoured, material.

He set his stall out from the start, with a slow performance of Scarlatti's Sonata in D minor, K213, in which the expressive adjustments were allowed to attenuate the sense of pulse. This resulted in a kind of wayward dreaminess, with past and future lost in the experience of an unanchored present.

O'Toole is finely attuned to the expressive possibilities of the music he plays, but in a way that sometimes causes priorities to be seriously redrawn. The rhythmic markers in Albéniz's Asturias, for example, faded below the strand of rapid repetition, and the big, strumming chords were like destabilising shockwaves.

This was a programme in which the music-making rarely sounded simple. Interesting attitudes were being struck, but not always brought off with quite the elan they needed. The things that sounded best were the atmospheric opening of Rodrigo's Invocación y danzaand the more firmly driven moments of the Bach.

On tour until May 23rd
MICHAEL DERVAN

Wrestling Dostoievsky
SS Michael & John, Dublin

"No name, no person," interrupts Daa Doberek, just as Branko Potocan is about to reveal his character's identity. However identifiable the characters in Slovenian company Betontanc's deconstruction of Dostoyevsky's novel, Crime and Punishment, the performers wish to keep artistic distance from merely representing them. It's all summed up in director MatjaPograjc's mini-manifesto in the programme notes, which urges a reaction to psychological realism.

Instead of reproducing characters, his performers "wrestle" with them to construct their own version: they play wrestling Raskolnikov, wrestling Sonja, wrestling Porfirij, wrestling Polja, wrestling Dunja and wrestling Svidrigajlov, a dramatis personae lite for the epic novel.

Pograjc places the audience close to the action, sitting them in the round as part of the action. Four rugs and lamps draped with blouses and other clothing create an intimate sitting-room setting, but rather than sinister, the atmosphere is actually quite homey, helped, no doubt, by the offers of biscuits and the requests for help turning on and off the lights around the perimeter of the performing space.

At a superficial level, the particular language of physical theatre chosen for Wrestling Dostoievskyis also soft-focus, however brutal, simple and crude. The physicality of thudding bone to floor never quite horrifies and even the kinaesthetic whirlwind at the climax didn't live up to its promise.

The scab-picking is clearer in the psychological barbs between the characters, an altogether more visceral battleground. Fed by their internal wrestling with self-doubt, each character desperately seeks understanding and approval, however extreme their thoughts. Within this mental anguish, compromise is needed, which fuels even more anxiety. "I would not mind if you would say, I am strange in a strange way," goes the song by Silence, whose music subtly underpins the action, but the crux of Wrestling Dostoievsky(and Crime and Punishment) is self-justification.

Pograjc rescues the characters from Dostoyevsky's plot and offers them a safe-house for self-examination, a metaphoric sanctuary that prompts Doberek's appeal for anonymity ("no name, no person"). Within this setting there are certainly inconsistencies and predictabilities, but the incongruent elements do manage to coalesce to form something much more symbolic.
MICHAEL SEAVER

Stenger, Trio Scordatura, Crash Ensemble
Temple Bar Gallery, Dublin

Phill Niblock - Hurdy Hurry. PK & SLS. G2-44. Tow by Tom. Sweet Potato. Disseminate.
When Crash Ensemble, with guests Susan Stenger (flute and guitar) and Trio Scordatura (voice, viola and keyboard), took over Temple Bar Gallery for just short of two-and-a-half hours, the four floors of space were infused with heavy sound and unceasing video.

Phill Niblock was in town.

This New York-based composer and film-maker, now 74, has created his musical niche in the compiling of drone-like pieces. The drones are not single lines, but, typically, 20- to 30-minute skeins in which the individual strands are created from recordings of actual instruments. Niblock strings them together - originally on tape, now on computer - in ways that are at once seamless and always shifting in internal alignment.

He likes things to be loud, so that the low-level acoustic and psychoacoustic outcomes of the interactions between musical pitches can become more pronounced. There are no shocks or distractions from percussive attacks or other radical short-term shifts in dynamic. It's a steady-state kind of music in which the loudness is like a visual close-up, uncovering features of the sound that might otherwise pass unnoticed.

It's also a transformative music. Just as after a certain amount of physical pressure you no longer sense shape but feel weight, or after a certain hotness in food no longer get flavour but just sense burning, after a certain amount of Niblock the perspective shifts.

Whatever is constant can yield in prominence to whatever is changing; the detail attracts the attention in spite of the massiveness that threatens to obscure it.

Sometimes the effect of the droning was simply too powerful. The sense of sonic immersion resulted in a kind of congealing. Niblock may use acoustic instruments as raw material (and he loves adding more for live performances, as well as silent movies that are like footage without commentary from the National Geographic Channel), but some of his moments of turbine-like oppressiveness left one thinking only of the possibility of an off button.

What's certain, however, is that he genuinely offers a concentrated kind of experience not readily available elsewhere.
MICHAEL DERVAN