Reviews today looks at acts from the Kilkenny arts festival
John Williams, Dresden Group, Ulster Orchestra/ Braithwaite, Malcolm Proud
Kilkenny and Callan
There's something disarmingly casual and informal in the stage manner of the great Australian guitarist John Williams. He can be vague and uncertain about dates and numbers, as he was in introducing the pieces he played at St Canice's Cathedral on Thursday. The information he provides can be both sketchy and unexpectedly informative. But there's nothing at all sketchy about the playing itself.
His performances were amplified, so that the guitar sounded like a giant of a kind, much louder at times than the concerted forces of the Maynooth Guitar Orchestra had been at the National Concert Hall the night before. By comparison, his speaking voice sounded almost tiny. The impression was very much of a man who wants to put the music first, and that's the impression that was made by his actual playing, too.
Williams has the skills of a teller of tales who can draw his listeners in with a few compelling images. He sets the tone and he delivers what he promises, whether it be 18th-century music re-imagined for guitar (he offered Vivaldi and Scarlatti), the kind of guitar-infused Spanish piano music that guitarists have successfully colonised for years (he offered three characteristically colourful pieces by Albéniz), or his own easy-listening pieces, which he delivers with lyrical freedom.
Incredible as it may seem, those pieces of his own made Williams one of only two living composers represented in the classical concerts of this year's Kilkenny Arts Festival. And Williams was responsible for the second composer, too, when he played Stephen Wingfield's arrangement of Peter Sculthorpe's meditative Djilile, itself derived from an Aboriginal melody that Sculthorpe has used often, and which he has come to identify with the dreamtime.
Djililewasn't the evening's only highly evocative music. Sí Beag Sí Móris a new discovery for Williams, and his performance of it as an encore showed just why he is one of the world's most treasured performers, as he made the guitar follow the most unexpected contours, shaping the silences as effectively as the notes.
For a number of years now Kilkenny has had a guest musician programming (or "curating" to use the fashionable phrase) a strand within the festival's classical concerts. This year it fell to the Dresden Group, made up of the members of the Kapellquintett Dresden (a wind quintet from Dresden's Staatskapelle orchestra) with a group of friends and colleagues on strings and piano.
The two concerts I heard were rather a mixed bag. The group's handling of Hanns Eisler's Vierzehn Arten, den Regen zu beschreiben( Fourteen Ways of Describing Rain) on Friday was exquisite in its floating delicacy.
The music itself, written in 1941 as the accompaniment to Joris Ivens's silent documentary, Rain, of 1929, was regarded by Eisler as his greatest achievement in the realm of chamber music. The Dresden Group played it with the kind of iridescence which made the composer's satisfaction seem fully justified.
The group's playing of Stravinsky's late Septet was, by comparison, strangely opaque, and the performance of Shostakovich's Piano Trio in E minor was beset with technical problems. The group returned to form for a Sunday afternoon out-of-town foray, to the Castalia Hall of the Camphill Community at Ballytobin, near Callan.
The octagonal wooden hall, with its eight naturally shaped structural tree-trunks, has a welcoming, calming ambience, and a dryish but pleasingly clear acoustic. The Dresden Group's handling of Mahler's early Piano Quartet movement in A minor was suitably brooding, and their delivery of Martinu's Trio for Flute, Cello and Piano agreeably frothy. But the highlight was Mozart's great Piano and Wind Quintet, at once light and profound, lean and virtuosic.
The Ulster Orchestra offered part of its recent BBC Proms programme on Saturday evening, but with Nicholas Braithwaite replacing Kenneth Montgomery on the podium for Dvorak's evergreen Eighth Symphony.
Braithwaite's approach was fresh, bracing and joyful, even if from my close seat the orchestral balances were sometimes a bit strange.
Braithwaite was stern and gripping in Beethoven's EgmontOverture and Priya Mitchell was an imaginatively free-wheeling soloist in an often deft, aptly small-scale account of Mozart's Violin Concerto in A, where in the Finale both orchestra and soloist highlighted the Eastern influences which have earned the work the nickname Turkish.
Saturday's other concert was a long lunchtime organ recital on the 1853 Bevington organ of St Canice's Cathedral which was recently restored by Trevor Crowe. Malcolm Proud, the cathedral's organist, played a selection from the third book of Bach's Clavierübung.
Rather than present the chorale treatments as stark contrasts of light and shade, he used the gentleness and clarity of the restored instrument to emulate the kind of balanced dialogue associated with the string quartet. The cathedral was full for the occasion, and Proud kept his listeners rapt and wrapped in Bach for the duration. MICHAEL DERVAN
Belarus Free Theatre
Watergate Theatre
About mid-way through Generation Jeans, the first of four works to be staged at the Kilkenny Arts Festival by Belarus Free Theatre, there comes a moment of audience participation. As Nikolai Khalezin, writer, director and performer of the monologue, urges us to yell the words, "I am free," there is a hesitance in our response, bordering on guilt.
It's easy enough, if slightly embarrassing, for a privileged audience to say these words in an Irish theatre on a Friday night. It's something else entirely for an audience in an apartment in Minsk, meeting in secret, under the threat of arrest, to attend a performance banned by the state. There, freedom is an imperative. Here, it is taken for granted.
Khalezin's monologue, underscored by a soundtrack from DJ Laurel, contains several totems of liberty, humorously detailing his childhood dabbling in the black market for records and jeans, and assorted symbols of defiance under a soviet system. "We wanted to know everything about Mick Jagger," he says, "and nothing about the Communist party."
If Khalezin's monologue leans towards sententiousness, so too do his politics. Arrested at a demonstration for a banner decrying dictatorship, he regrets not delivering "an aphorism about freedom" on his arrest. Though he will detail the disturbing experience of trial without representation and the psychological horror of being imprisoned in an 80cm by 80cm cell, the message retains a sloganeering simplicity, culminating with the image of a denim shirt, tied to a stick, and used as an alternative national flag.
Under the thumb of oppression, such sentiments are stirring and urgent. Here, though, the thrill is vicarious.
Being Harold Pinter, a more theatrically ambitious production by director Vladimir Scherban, presents us with excerpts of five Pinter plays, woven together into a cohesive whole, united by the text of the writer's 2006 Nobel Prize acceptance speech. If Pinter is a writer whose work has always been political - obliquely at first, more forcefully in his later years - Scherban's staging makes its points loud and clear.
The absurd facets in Pinter's work are retained and even amplified by a cast of seven through The Homecoming, Old Timesand The New World Order, but in Scherban's hands the menace erupts into outright violence. One For The Road, explicitly about state torture and coercion, is presented almost in its entirety and the implied violence becomes literalised with characters stripped, blindfolded and burned with flaming torches.
That may seem like overkill to an audience used to decoding symbols before they get to the political content. But while Scherban is no stranger to an effective theatrical device - dividing text between speakers, incorporating unnerving sound effects and creating horrifyingly beautiful stage pictures - there's little room for ambiguity when censorship, torture and disappearance are part of your political reality.
A late addition to the programme was the European premiere of Khalezin's Discover Love, a biographical monologue dealing explicitly with "enforced disappearances", which concentrated as much on the aesthetic of its performance as its message. The exhortation to respect human rights and fight for freedom of expression will only have affirmed the politics of Belarus Free Theatre's growing international audience. It is the company's growing confidence in that expression, though, that is the most encouraging sign for the future. PETER CRAWLEY
