Piano Piece No 4, Stop The War!, Dance, De Profundis - RzewskiIt was a coup for the Oscar Wilde Festival to bring the composer and pianist Frederic Rzewski to Ireland for the first time.
Frederic Rzewski
Castlecoole, Enniskillen
This concert was the final event in a weekend centring on Portora School, in Enniskillen, which numbers both Wilde and Samuel Beckett among its past pupils.
Born in the US but resident for many years in Belgium, Rzewski has a unique position in contemporary music. His work combines tonal and atonal elements, but one suspects Rzewski regards such distinctions as artificial.
The main work here was De Profundis, written in 1992 to mark the centenary of Wilde's imprisonment. The pianist plays, strikes the resonant parts of the piano case, whistles and recites segments of Wilde's text. The mixture is lively, intriguing and deeply moving.
Rzewski's social commitment also comes to the fore in Stop The War! (2003), receiving only its second performance. The key phrase, intoned by the pianist, punctuates music by turns contemplative and rhythmically vital. Both this and the engaging Dance (1999) belong to a projected cycle of 64 piano pieces entitled The Road. Piano Piece No 4 (1977) combines the rhythmic energy of the minimalists with a harmonic richness that is Rzewski's own. Let's hope it isn't too long before we are able to hear Rzewski again. -Dermot Gault
Liam O'Flynn, Steve Cooney & Liam O'Connor
Liberty Hall Theatre, Dublin
Funny how the more skilled the musician, the greater the ability to strip the music bare, so its essential beauty is there for all the world to relish. This was a night of music stripped to the core - and then restored.
Belfast-born Ring resident Áine Uí Cheallaigh bravely opened the book with a lissom selection of songs, some of liberty, others of love lost, all bequeathed with a wistful yen for what remains doggedly out of reach.
Sliabh Luachra's mythical borders expanded with the arrival of Paudie O'Connor and Aoife Ní Chaoimh. O'Connor's accordion bears all the hallmarks of the Sliabh Luachra style: unreconstructed, spirited and ultimately indebted to the legacy of Johnny O'Leary and Patrick O'Keeffe.
Theirs was a glorious pairing of reels, slides and polkas, many of them rarities seldom heard outside the Ballydesmond hinterland.
Liam O'Flynn embraced the night's proceedings in startlingly loquacious form, conspiratorially sharing the seed, breed and generational details of each tune with us. His decision to christen the night with a rendition of The Foxhunt, by his own reckoning "the only full-length descriptive piece for pipes in the tradition", set a pace that Steve Cooney and Liam O'Connor delighted in matching on guitar and fiddle. O'Flynn revelled in the music, jettisoning his pipes in favour of the whistle for a sublime reading of Sliabh Na mBan.
Cooney's guitar was, as ever, cossetted with a pinprick sensitivity to the heat, light and shade of the pair of hornpipes The Humours Of Castle Barnard and The Atlantic Roar, but it soared skywards when afforded space to breathe alone, as in a subtle Fáinne Gheal An Lae.
O'Connor has been building on experience over the past year, his identity gradually emerging from the shadows of his uncannily mature influences, including Tommy Peoples and Sean Potts. In company or alone, he shines incandescently, particularly on the solo slow air The Wild Geese.
As the trio took flight on The Humours Of Ballyloughlin, we knew we were in the presence of greatness. - Siobhán Long
Jimmy Cliff
The Village, Dublin
You'd think that after a four-decade, 22-album career, 55-year-old Jimmy
Cliff might be thinking about taking it
easy. But the man who reputedly
helped Bob Marley record his first song while still a teenager hasn't slowed down a jot.
Cliff bounded onto a stage already warmed by the intro of his nine-piece band, who looked and sounded as if they'd been living and breathing reggae since they took their first steps.
Opening with his hit You Can Get It If You Really Want, the set moved from high-tempo ska to the softest reggae beats, covering Cliff's career in the process. Wonderful World Beautiful People, the protest song Vietnam, Let Your Yea Be Yea, The Harder They Come, Many Rivers To Cross, Cat Stevens' Wild World: he has always flown close to the mainstream in his music, and the changing flavours of his reggae at times evoked 1970s London and San Francisco, the fluorescent power pop of the 1980s and the more subdued, revisionist approaches of the 1990s.
Closing the gig was a cover of Johnny Nash's I Can See Clearly Now, a hit for Cliff in the 1990s, which provoked a massive singalong and induced hundreds of grins, all matching the huge beam that was spread across Cliff's face from the start.
For an encore, which was more postscript than rousing climax, the band, each armed with a bongo, assembled on stools around Cliff to sing a funereally slow rendition of Boney M's Rivers Of Babylon.
Verging on gospel, the outro sashayed to a rousing but almost melancholic end. But it was the kind of melancholy that it's a pleasure to experience, like the aftertaste of genuinely moving experience. As the man himself said: "I want to stimulate and motivate people to appreciate life;it's my calling." A job well done. - John Lane
