Dionne Warwick, Vicar Street, Dublin
Dionne Warwick may be in the game 40 years, but when she took to Vicar Street's cosy stage, it was clear just how good the years have been to the lady and her music. Teaming up with the song-writing duo of Hal David and Burt Bacharach in the 1960s produced a string of hits that in many ways were of their time. Yet woven into the songs, thanks a great deal to Warwick's soul-infused interpretations, is a timelessness that allowed them to become classics, helping to give her performance a vitality and an energy that had nothing to do with a mere revisiting of the good ol' days.
The collaboration was one of the most successful of the decade, resulting in such hits as Don't Make Me Over, Do You Know the Way to San Jose?, Walk On By, I'll Never Fall in Love Again, Say a Little Prayer, and Alfie, all tailored to showcase Warwick's remarkable voice, which, if a little softer than in her youth, managed to sound as good as at any time in her career.
Warwick's unhurried anecdotal way of introducing each song, encouraging the crowd to join in, quickly evaporated any psychological barrier between audience and stage and created the feeling of a cabaret/nightclub-style show. The gig quickly turned into an atmospheric singalong, reaching a mellow climax with That's What friends are For, a thoughtful cover of Sting's Fragile and What The World Needs Now is Love, Sweet Love.
The power of her voice has inevitably diminished a little with age, but Warwick has lost none of her ability to bring a song to life and create something almost unique every time she sings, something she seems capable of doing for many years to come. John Lane
Joe Dolan, Vicar Street, Dublin
It wasn't quite an arrival on stage; more of an eruption really. His whites are whiter than anything we'd seen in a Surf ad, and as soon as he opened up those vocal cords on You're Such A Good Lookin' Woman there was no going back. Just as well really, since the 70 per cent female audience expected nothing less than full throttle for this entire two-hour performance that surely qualified as an extravaganza.
Anyone nostalgic for the sweat-laden, breathless falsetto flourishes of three decades ago would have been disappointed. This was no showband revival on a zimmer frame. Nor was it a hackneyed country 'n' Irish hobble down memory lane. Dolan and his seven-piece band, featuring saxophone and trumpet, lost no time in reminding us why he still manages to seduce his audiences as effortlessly as he did long before there were comfort zones such as Vicar Street.
So, his pelvis mightn't quite have the range it had, but then neither does Tom Jones's. Those vocal cords have lost little of their elasticity, and the repertoire is a keen reminder of the sheer volume of original material he introduced to unsuspecting audiences. Dolan's more recent reincarnation as flag-bearer for a new world where The Girl Who Lived In The House With The White Washed Gable consorts with Disco 2000 and The Universal is a lesson in lateral thinking that Jarvis Cocker, Damon Albarn and Robbie Williams would do well to observe closely.
So is this rock 'n' roll? The jury might be out on that one, but for sheer entertainment value, Dolan has few opponents. Unperturbed by the countless knickers flung onstage, with his lapels upturned and his high-heeled boots spit shiny, Joe Dolan unleashed that tremolo and left the pretenders languishing in the shade. Vegas on Thomas Street. That's what it felt like . . . for a little while at least. Siobhan Long
Castagneri Quartet, Coach House, Dublin Castle
Henri Dutilleux - Ainsi la nuit. Mozart - Quartet in D, K575. David Fennessy - felt. Dvorák - Quartet No 12 in F, Op.96
From its first chords, ominously nocturnal, faintly menacing, Dutilleux's only string quartet creates its own atmosphere with such persuasiveness that it banishes the memory of its predecessors in the classical tradition. It uses the most delicate of means and at times has an air of such fragility that one feels it could only too easily shatter in less capable hands than those of the Castagneri Quartet from France.
Though its musical language is obviously of our time, it is contrived with such a delicate appreciation of its medium that it sounds completely natural. So much so, that Mozart's Quartet in D which followed it in the programme sounded quite strange and not at all familiar, full of unexpected twists and turns. It might have been a new work, and it took all four movements for me to re-adjust. The Castagneri had the keenest appreciation of its stylistic innovation.
felt by David Fennessy, who was born in 1976, the year Dutilleux wrote his Quartet, gets much of its harmonic material from the brief introduction to Mozart's "Dissonance" Quartet. The harmonic flavour is, in the composer's words, "as if it has been put through some kind of musical blender".
The work, receiving its first performance, is brashly declamatory and conveys a feeling of urgency, but it could be that the composer is overplaying his hand by making every moment of equal significance.
Dvorák's so-called "American" Quartet involved another sudden change of style. The Castagneri were as lush and bucolic as one could wish, without descending into ethnic chocolate-box sentimentality. Douglas Sealy
