A selection of review by Irish Timeswriters.
Carducci Quartet Festival
CIT Cork School of Music
By Michael Dervan
The Curtis Auditorium at the new CIT Cork School of Music got a weekend workout through the Carducci Quartet Festival, organised by the school itself in association with the Cork Orchestral Society and Music Network. And at the festival's close, the school's director, Geoffrey Spratt, took to the stage to announce that the Carducci Quartet had been appointed ensemble-in-residence at the school.
The new auditorium, which seats almost 400, is decorated in tones of dark aubergine, brightened by the casework of the Neiland organ at the back of the raised stage. More than half of the seats are on the flat in front of the stage, with a tiered section at the back, which rises to a second entrance at the first-floor level.
Some of the curses of modern buildings were present over the weekend - inappropriate temperature control (too breezy and too chilly) with attendant noise from the air-circulation system, and audio and lighting control systems (along with their cooling fans) located within the auditorium.
The new venue, with its generous stage and closable orchestra pit, is obviously a great improvement on what went before, and it also offers facilities that no other music school in Ireland can rival.
The acoustic proved actually rather hard to judge over the four concerts of the weekend. It sounded at its best in part of the piano duet recital by the Capova sisters, Rebecca and Kirsten, in their sharply-pointed account of Poulenc's Sonata and the unfailing delights of some of Dvorak's Slavonic Dances, and also in the weekend's biggest and most popular offering, a performance of Carnival of the Animals by Saint-Saëns.
The Saint-Saëns was given with Ogden Nash's verses, for which Fiona Shaw's slightly coquettish delivery was timed to perfection. The performance was conducted by Geoffrey Spratt, who wisely avoided the sort of guying exaggerations which often mar performances of this piece. His clear thinking made it possible to cherish the unwittingly forward-looking nature of much of Saint-Saëns's writing in this piece.
I heard the Saint-Saëns from quite close to the stage (where, with a full house, the sound was quite dry), the piano duets from the back row of the seats on the floor. The Carducci's performances of quartets and quintets I sampled from a number of vantage points, including two locations in the tiered seating and a couple of rows from the front of the stage.
My general impression was that the sound lacked a little in focus wherever I sat, but there was a compensating immediacy in the closer position.
The repertoire included works by Mozart (the C major String Quintet with Cian Ó Dúill) and Haydn (the Fifths Quartet), which were handled in a workmanlike way. Ciara Moroney was a fluent but rarely assertive partner in Schumann's Piano Quintet, a work which showed the quartet's leader, Matthew Denton, at his imaginative best.
They handled Dvorak's Quintet in G, Op 77, with a well-anchored Rory Dempsey on double bass, with an expressive insistence which reminded me of the style of the RTÉ Vanbrugh Quartet in this kind of repertoire.
They were at their most impressive in Ian Wilson's unbroken white line, an adaptation of music originally for saxophone quartet and a piece which only briefly steps out of its aggressive moto-perpetuo manner. They presented it as good, old-fashioned, jagged, dissonant modernism, with moments that seemed to emerge straight out of the world of Bartók.
Tinney, RTÉ NSO/Markson
NCH, Dublin
By Michael Dungan
Wagner - Rienzi Overture. Mendelssohn - Piano Concerto No 1 in G minor. Strauss - Don Juan, Rosenkavalier Suite.
This was a bravely unfamiliar, curiously assembled programme featuring rich-as-trifle, platform-cramming orchestration in three out of four works.
Hugely popular during his lifetime, Wagner's third opera, Rienzi, is now rarely staged (neither Opera Ireland nor Wexford has done it). This may have something to do with its massive, grand, opera-style size: the premiere is reported to have lasted more than six hours.
Wagner helps establish his setting - amidst the aristocracy of 14th-century Rome - with fanfares and flourishes, some of which dominate the overture.
Here, the NSO brass were in fine, imperious form under principal conductor Gerhard Markson. Overall, however, the promotion of this piece as stand-alone concert repertoire was undermined by a slight deficit of conviction.
In contrast, Richard Strauss's Don Juan - the evening's lone item from the standard repertoire - received a highly charged, committed performance in which Markson exacted a powerful unanimity of intent and execution.
This ensured that both music and theatricality were well served in Strauss's affectionate and programmatic portrayal of the Don, now heroic, now poetic, now melancholy.
It left the ears well-disposed towards a suite of excerpts from Der Rosenkavalier, despite the fact that, like the Rienzi, Strauss's Viennese rom-com opera is hardly familiar to Irish audiences - it is almost a quarter of a century since it was last staged in Dublin. Unlike the Wagner, however, its waltzes and charm give it a self-sufficiency that helped it sit comfortably in the programme.
Stuck in the middle of all the romantic rhetoric and heavy scoring was Mendelssohn's G minor Piano Concerto with its Mozart-scale orchestra.
Soloist Hugh Tinney was always equal to the fire of the first movement and the mischievous, busy virtuosity of the finale.
But the greater substance of the gentle second movement was the highlight, with Tinney and Markson working in close, chamber music-style partnership.
The Little Mermaid
Pavilion, Dún Laoghaire
Gerry Colgan
The jewel in the crown of this year's International Puppet Festival had to be Poland's Arlekin Theatre's production of The Little Mermaid.
It was created in Copenhagen for the bicentenary, in 2005, of Hans Christian Andersen's birth, and is a marionette show in the grand manner with a company of 17 - an enormous number by puppetry standards.
It opens to the sound of waves and seabirds' cries, and immediately dives into the fantastic world of an undersea palace, with mermaids and seahorses moving gracefully through pillars and arches.
A great storm erupts, and a young prince falls from his ship.
He is saved by a little mermaid, who brings him to land.
The story follows the traditional plot. A human girl finds the prince, who assumes that she is his saviour and wishes to marry her.
The mermaid is bereft, and goes to a giant octopus for a spell to make her human.
He obliges, but at an agonising price.
Even then, her love goes astray, and she returns to the sea to meet her fate, but is saved in a happy ending with a difference.
All of this is beautifully created with brilliant puppets, picturesque sets, perfect costumes and atmospheric sound.
The voices are all pitched to character - but in Polish. Although each scene is prefaced by a few explanatory words in English, the continuous dialogue remains opaque - a small price to pay for such overriding elegance.
