Michael Dervan attends two concerts at the Kilkenny Arts Festival

Scholl, Young

Kilkenny Arts Festival

IT WAS a brave move by German countertenor Andreas Scholl to spend the entire evening in the English language for the opening concert of the Kilkenny Arts Festival on Friday.

English-speaking performers frequently turn to German song, but German singers have far less cause to sing in English. Scholl, of course, has devoted his latest CD, Crystal Tears, to the music of John Dowland and his contemporaries. In Kilkenny they shared the programme, half and half, with folk-song arrangements made by Scholl's musical partner, Crawford Young, who played on lute before the interval, and then switched to guitar.

The sheer artifice of the early music, the cleverness of both music and text, the beauty of the musical lines and the particular beauty of Scholl's voice impressed far more than the direct communication of the texts themselves. The style, even when Scholl got into the area of teasing delays, gave more the impression of cool calculation than direct expression.

The singer warned his audience at St Canice's Cathedral of the apprehension he was experiencing about one of the folk songs he had chosen for the second half. He knew that singing an Irish song to an Irish audience would be a special kind of challenge. And when he came to She Moved Through the Fair, he suffered a false start and showed a degree of stiffness that hadn't been evident in the earlier folk songs.

His task in the folk songs was not made any easier by the nature of Young's arrangements, which at times seemed almost to obstruct the cadence of the vocal line. Yet it was actually at the start of the folk-song section - with I am a Poor Wayfaring Stranger, Pretty Saroand Down by the Salley Gardens- that Scholl sounded at his most relaxed and easygoing, flexing the rhythm to the import of the words in ways that seem to have eluded him in the selection of lute songs. - MICHAEL DERVAN

Booth, Camerata Kilkenny/Zwiener

Kilkenny Arts Festival

Bach - Cantatas 202. Brandenburg Concerto No 2. Violin Concerto in E.

Cantata 51

WITH NADJA Zwiener as guest director and soprano Claire Booth as soloist, Camerata Kilkenny gave an upbeat, all-Bach programme at St Canice's Cathedral on Saturday.

The evening got off to a delectable start. The opening chords of Bach's Wedding Cantata, Weichet nur, betrübte Schatten(Gloomy shadows, be gone), were handled with such cushioned softness they almost seemed to melt as they rose.

Booth's singing was firm and sure, somewhat larger in scale than the orchestral playing, and prone to an intensity of vibrato on longer notes that at times seemed out of keeping with the character of the music-making as a whole.

Booth was more at one with music and orchestral colleagues in the extrovert Jauchzet Gott in allen Landen(Praise God in all lands). Sadly, the trumpet obligatos by David Staff were extraordinarily unreliable and accident-prone, so rather than crowning the mood of celebration, the trumpet's contributions rather got in the way.

Staff had an equally difficult time in the challenges of the second Brandenburg Concertowhere, with the best will in the world, there was nothing much the other soloists (Zwiener on violin, Ian Wilson on recorder and Hannah McLaughlin on oboe) could do to mask the problems. The trumpet-free slow movement was the natural highlight.

In the Violin Concerto in E, Zwiener danced with a light spring in the outer movements, and allowed the slow movement's wide-ranging melody to sing with soulful plaintiveness. - MICHAEL DERVAN