Reviewed: Ballaké Sissoko, Driss El Maloumiand Rajery and Ensemble Avalon, Callino String Quartet, Petcu-Colan, Tinney
Ballaké Sissoko, Driss El Maloumi and Rajery
Farmleigh House, Dublin
We could learn much from the intuition that bound these three virtuoso musicians together. Drawn from Mali, Morocco and Madagascar, Ballaké Sissoko, Driss El Maloumi and Rajery communicated with as much, if not more fluency as a trio bred within a pony ride of one another.
To try to pull a drawstring around these disparate and elemental musical worlds is an audacious conceit, but miraculously, it works. And maybe it excels precisely because this touring experiment has been a magnetic force binding three exceptional musicians together, where lazy labels such as "classical" and "traditional" are rendered utterly redundant by their soaring musical virtuosity.
Sissoko's kora has iconic status in his home country of Mali. It's an instrument that defies its harp-like conception by challenging its player to not so much master, as commune illicitly with its 21 strings.
Sissoko's intensely personal relationship with those strings sparkled from the circuitous opener, Anfass, to the advanced calculus-like rhythms of 3MA, although he was probably most at home with the material rooted in his own home place.
El Maloumi's Moroccan oud acted like a spirit level between the kora and Rajery's valiha (a bamboo tube zither from Madagascar), tiptoeing in between their taut, haughty strings to modulate the mood of everything from the ode to childhood, Toufoula, to the jesting Taxi Brousse or Jungle Taxi.
Their voices emerged from the strings with sparing elegance, and reached a crescendo on Awal, a Berber waltz-like song that obliterated whatever boundaries lay between the musicians.
If language was ever a barrier, this music sidestepped it through a combination of poly-rhythms and the kind of serene melody lines that make a mockery of popular love songs.
This was the third and final Farmleigh concert in the OPW's summer Salon Music series: a visionary exercise in inventive programming that offered music in magnificent surroundings. Probably the longest ray of sunshine we've had all summer. - SIOBHÁN LONG
Ensemble Avalon, Callino String Quartet, Petcu-Colan, Tinney
NCH, Dublin
Fauré - Piano Trio;Debussy - Quartet in G minor; Mozart - Sonata in E minor K304; Chausson - Concert in D Op 21.
Paris between the 1890s and the 1920s was one of the most exciting of musical cities. It was the scene of the riotous premiere of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring. Debussy and Ravel forged other kinds of new paths. It was in the programme note for the ballet Parade, a collaboration between Satie, Picasso and Cocteau, that poet Guillaume Apollinaire coined the description "sur-réaliste".
Young Darius Milhaud set an agricultural catalogue to music, and Francis Poulenc used lines from Les Poésies de Makoko Kangourou, a hoax volume of "Liberian" poetry, in his iconoclastic Rapsodie nègre. It was a time and a place where everything seemed possible.
The Paris presented on Wednesday by Finghin Collins, programmer of the National Concert Hall's Summer Chamber series, preserved the creases in its clothes, even when under exertion on the lawn.
Collins's Paris was not much enlivened by Wednesday's performances. The Avalon Ensemble treated Gabriel Fauré's late trio of 1923 not as the distillation of a life's experience, but as a watery version of old-fashioned conventions.
Chausson's Concert in D (1891), for violin (Ioana Petcu-Colan), piano (Hugh Tinney) and string quartet (the Callinos), is a work where the extremity of the excess is surely part of the point.
It sounded as if no one alerted the performers to the fact there's no nice way to bring off this example of music gone to seed.
Petcu-Colan and Tinney were neat but slightly disengaged partners in one of Mozart's loveliest sonatas, the Violin Sonata in E minor. The evening's greatest pleasure was the Callinos' performance of Debussy's early Quartet in G minor. The quartet have the knack of registering harmonic character with ease. It's a knack that, in spite of some rough edges, enabled them to capture the freshness of the only string quartet Debussy would complete. - MICHAEL DERVAN
