While lights and sounds plot a logical route through Happy Days and New Quartet, Charles Linehan's choreography seems to take unpredictable twists and turns.
An almost sculptural lighting rig supports lamps hung in symmetric rows and arranged in a rational spectrum, rising from straw-coloured lights at stage level to a single blue high in the gantry.
In the first moments of Happy Days six side lamps slowly begin to glow, their beams articulating through dry-ice and picking out dancers Greig Cooke and Rahel Vonmoos. As those dancers' arms softly swing and reach upwards, they sometimes unbalance torsos that are rescued by a lurching foot. Nothing is in unison, but the dancers are connected by common motifs.
This seems the essence of Linehan's choreographic credo. His vocabulary is deliberately limited and phrases constantly re-emerge, even in different works. Sometimes paragraphs of this understated movement follow similar musical events as in Happy Days, when Andreja Rauch joins Cooke and Vonmoos just at the moment the sound of wind sneaks behind the simple repeated plucked guitar octaves. But more often the choreography simply counterpoints the broad brush strokes of a lighting change or sudden change of music. There is a predictability in its unpredictability that hints at a structure subtly-hidden from the surface.
After the interval, Ben Ash joins the other three dancers in New Quartet. Continuing where Happy Days left off, albeit with more of a sense of urgency, movement becomes more purposefully traced along straight lines and performers sometimes concur in a sudden acceleration of activity. When Cooke suddenly lifts a horizontal Vonmoos to his waist the intimacy is almost shocking, but in spite of changes of tone the choreography remains soft-spoken.
Throughout New Quartet Vonmoos has a central role in the succession of duets and trios, and the spatial detachment of Happy Days - where the performers often seemed to simply co-exist - is less evident. Some may yearn more theatricality and be impatient with the narrow range of movement, but there is a seductiveness in Linehan's confident choreographic voice that satisfies the rational senses and beguiles the irrational. - Michael Seaver
International Dance Festival Ireland - Montalvo Hervieu - Abbey Theatre
If Monty Python were a dance company in the south of France with Henri Matisse as choreographer and designer, the result would come very close to the production On danse (Let's Dance) by Montalvo Hervieu.
Based in Val-de-Marne, an area just southeast of Paris, the company draws on the urban centre's cultural diversity to create this colourful and joyful piece that never loses its energy - nor its audience.
The difference between the above imaginary construct and Montalvo Hervieu, apart from the fact that the latter offers a supremely accomplished dance spectacle, is that its lightness is unencumbered by any invective or cynicism. It could be shallow and unchallenging, but it isn't.
On danse reflects pure joie de vivre, reflected in the sky-blue backdrop, and clear enjoyment of its dancers - some even bound with gravity-defying buoyancy on a hidden trampoline at the close of the show.
An elaborate and witty video installation accompanies the programme, with which the dancers interact in playful ways. Apes loping across the screen are followed in close imitation by a dancer in a suit; a dancer's magic trick pulling screen bunnies out of a real hat, leads to a stage backdrop filled with oversize rabbits, sniffing menacingly.
Dancers appear and disappear into the "hedge" in the manorial French garden, inspired - like the piece - by the Baroque music of Jean-Philippe Rameau, whose comic opera Les Paladins provides most of the score here.
As entertaining as it is, though, the backdrop does sometimes detract attention from the wonderful dancing. The dancers' diversity proves an invaluable choreographic tool: they are trained in everything from ballet to break-dancing, fusing manifold stylistic elements into a programme that never ceases to delight. The carefree joy of street dancing combined excellently with the Baroque music; the juxtaposition never felt forced.
The message of the performance was pleasure, reinforced by dancers communing as well as communicating with the audience about how they dance and how it makes them feel: "Dance is made of change. Do whatever you want, do whatever makes you free!", "I dance to leave my body behind", "When I dance, it puts me in a good mood". It put the audience in a good mood, too. At the end, the smiling spectators nearly levitated out of the theatre. - Christine Madden
Hades Droichead Arts Centre, Drogheda
Declan Gorman's play, first seen in 1998, might be described as a stream of collective consciousness in which the characters are symptoms of a general malaise. It has no single storyline, although it illuminates the lives and actions of many.
But through it flows the aura of the border town Ballinascaul, like Hades a place of shadows, oppressing its people.
Although it was written during a time when the promise of peace was writ large, the play has its roots too deeply embedded in human nature to have been made in any way redundant by future tragic events. Indeed, most of the characters depicted in it show no overt interest in the politics that have shaped their environment.
This particular Hades poisons its denizens through an absence of hope, imposing a resigned acceptance of a milieu that offers little for the spirit. They include a young journalist getting nowhere, a taxi driver who cannot keep his teenage daughter from the drug-and-booze disco, a tragic wino, a pompous school principal who betrays his wife, a seedy hotel with its gossipy chambermaids, a hoodlum, a moneylender and many others.
Ballinascaul has little to offer any of them, because they are helplessly complicit in its decay.
Five actors (Gerry McCann, Ciaran Kenny, Sarah Gilbert, Tara Nixon O'Neill and John Finegan) play a host of characters with impressive versatility and conviction. The plays ends, as it must, with a sense of unfinished business, but it has already had a companion piece (Epic) from the same stable. A trilogy, to be called "The Border Chronicles 1997-2007" will be completed next year with a new play, At Peace. Interesting times ahead. - Gerry Colgan
Runs to May 6th; tours to May 17th
Martin Stadtfeld (piano) NCH John Field Room, Dublin
Bach - Goldberg Variations
There have long been pianists who established reputations based in the first instance on their Bach playing. Harold Samuel, Harriet Cohen, Edwin Fischer and Samuil Feinberg did it in the first half of the 20th century, Rosalyn Tureck, Glenn Gould, Tatiana Nikolayeva and Angela Hewitt in the second. And back in the Ireland of the 1940s, Claud Biggs performed the entire Well-Tempered Clavier in a series of radio broadcasts.
In recent years the Bach playing of Martin Stadtfeld (born 1980) has been turning heads and fluttering hearts in his native Germany. Like Glenn Gould before him, he began his recording career with the Goldberg Variations, and he chose the same work for his Irish debut at the NCH John Field Room. The comparisons Stadtfeld is inviting have not been lost on commentators.
"This boy is worth his weight in Gould," ran an uncredited quote on the printed programme.
The differences between Stadtfeld and Gould seem to be greater than the similarities, in spite of the young German's assertion that "no one opened my senses to the Goldberg Variations in as educational and impressive a way as he did".
Stadtfeld's sense of fantasy and caprice would almost make Gould sound severe. He takes liberties with Bach's text. The right hand octave transpositions in his presentation of the theme set the tone for a performance in which effects of surface abounded.
The idea of the octave transpositions, it quickly became clear, was going to be worked hard, and he took it through a broad range of permutations and combinations, heedless of the fact that the effect on a work so intrinsically rich amounts to little more than gilding the lily.
Having set himself up to do so, Stadtfeld carried out his task with imagination and flair. He is light and fleet of finger, and delighted in ringing the changes in repeats, an area in which he proved a lot more generous than the repeat-shy Gould.
His success in maintaining linear clarity through passages he chose to deliver with heavy-duty emphasis was limited, and there were even a few moments where the contrapuntal writing rather coagulated on him. But his concentration was mostly on effects that inclined toward a dance-like spring and swing, and his pianistic savoir-faire hardly ever deserted him, in spite of the extreme demands of velocity and articulation that he was prepared to impose on himself.
This was a reading of the Goldbergs with never a dull moment, but many an eyebrow-raising one, a performance guaranteed to satisfy the kind of listener who might be inclined to think the Mona Lisa would benefit from a touch of lip gloss and eye-liner. - Michael Dervan
Vogler Spring Festival Drumcliffe, Co Sligo
The Vogler Spring Festival follows a pattern which leaves the second half of the closing concert unprogrammed. There's a grand set piece in the first half (this year it was the Mendelssohn Octet) and then the musicians let their hair down for party pieces, jokes (a competitive two-cello improvisation announced under a makey-uppey Russian name), dazzling fireworks (some viola pyrotechnics from Hindemith), and undiluted sentimentality (Danny Boy and some heartstring-tugging Kreisler).
The Mendelssohn was given a high-octane reading by the Vogler Quartet with Carolin Widmann and Catherine Leonard (violins), Tatjana Masurenko (viola) and Jan-Erik Gustafson (cello), the performance engaging in just the sort of pump-it-up playing you can expect to bring an audience to its feet - which it duly did.
But the music-making included rather too much that was actually off colour from the leader of the Vogler Quartet, Tim Vogler, who took on the almost concerto-like role of the first violin in this piece.
All performers have their ups and downs, and on the evidence of the concerts I heard at this year's festival, the Voglers are in something of a trough at the moment, with the other members of the group not quite managing to compensate for the leader's current idiosyncrasies of intonation, limited range of tone colour, and strangely clipped articulation.
Bruckner's String Quintet in F is a challenging work which attempts to bring the composer's orchestral style to bear on a medium that can hardly bear it. With the Voglers as they are at the moment, it didn't stand a chance.
Mozart's late Quintet in D, K593 (again with Masurenko on viola), fared rather better. And the Voglers were better again in the Gothick impressionism of André Caplet's Conte fantastique, with harpist Clíona Doris and actor Alan Stanford, who gave a measured reading of The Masque of the Red Death, the Edgar Allan Poe tale which inspired the music.
Sadly, there was also a major weak link in the line-up of guests this year, with German pianist Frank-Immo Zichner lacking the necessary tonal and dynamic control to keep musically abreast of his partners.
He was paired up at times with two of the festival's top performers. Violinist Catherine Leonard's gutsy, musically piercing style was alone almost enough to carry Fauré's Sonata in A and Ian Wilson's from the book of longing, and soprano Ailish Tynan staked a fair claim to be the most beautiful sounding of Irish sopranos.
Tynan is as easy of musical manner as she is engaging of personality.
She is one of those performers who communicates with uncommon directness her own pleasure in the act of performance.
That pleasure and its rewards sometimes seem to be almost purely vocal - as in her selection of songs by Richard Strauss - and even the words of Schumann's Frauenliebe und -Leben (A Woman's Life and Love) at times seemed more a kind of carrier for the voice than a medium of communication in themselves.
The best of her singing came at the stormy heart of Shostakovich's late, dark Seven Romances on Poems of Alexander Blok, with Catherine Leonard and Russian pianist Vladimir Ovchinnikov making a devastating impact, and Jan-Erik Gustafson a tower of strength when he was called on - Shostakovich uses a different instrumental combination for each song.
Ovchinnikov also featured in a late-night, all-Russian solo recital, following six of Shostakovich's Bach-inspired preludes and fugues with Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition. Ovchinnikov is a player in the grand Russian manner, noble in declamation, fearless in the face of technical obstacles, and downright liberal at times when it comes to the detail of the composers' texts.
He seemed to think that both Shostakovich and Mussorgsky needed a helping hand at times. His approach was at its most extreme in the Mussorgsky, where he not only played around with dynamics, but added notes of his own, as if the unfortunate composer had failed to get it right.
He's by no means alone in taking such an approach to this particular piece. Leif-Ove Andsnes was even more extreme at the NCH two years ago.
But it has been my experience - and Ovchinnikov's playing did nothing to alter it - that Mussorgsky knew what he was doing, meant what he wrote, and is best served by not playing free and loose with his music.
That said, Ovchinnikov stated his case with virtuosic effectiveness, and his controlled sonic sculpting was a pianistic pleasure in itself.
It was interesting also to hear him out of what seems his natural territory, partnering Ailish Tynan very effectively in some of Benjamin Britten's folksong arrangements (including an unforgettable Down by the Salley Gardens), and Jan-Erik Gustafsson in a highly-energised account of Beethoven's Cello Sonata in G minor, Op 5 No 2.
Among the other performances which stand out in the memory is violinist Carolin Widmann's playing of her brother Jörg's three Études for violin solo, works which call on the violinist to sing and play at the same time, and which might best be described as a kind of fantastical pseudo-improvisatory exploration of violin sonority.
The piece probably also set some sort of Irish record for the most music stands required for a single work - the span covered nearly the full width of St Columba's Church. Michael Dervan
