In 1961 New York Times critic Robert Shelton rambled into Gerde's Folk club in New York City, and chanced upon a badly dressed 20-year-old musician sharing the bill.
"He is consciously trying to recapture the rude beauty of a Southern field hand musing in melody on his back porch," wrote Shelton. Forty-five years on, and Bob Dylan is still peddling in crude beauty, albeit on a bigger back porch.
Standing behind a keyboard, derby hat tilted backwards, Dylan looked to have rediscovered his snarling phrasing here, from the crisp intro of Maggie's Farm to the affirming She Belongs to Me, and the aptly vaudeville Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum.
The pace slowed a little with Blind Willie McTell and Watching the River Flow, yet any let-up was temporary.
A karaoke version of Just Like a Woman, ending in an enthusiastic "thank you" confirmed suspicions - this was the iconic songster back to his structured and coherent best. Hell, he even looked to be enjoying himself.
The reworking of well-worn classics was in evidence throughout; yet with no Lay Lady Lay, Mr Tambourine Man or Hurricane, it was more recent tracks, such as Cold Irons Bound, that received most doctoring. Guitar work was left in the capable hands of Danny Freeman on lead and Stu Kimball on rhythm, with Dylan alternating between keyboards and harmonica while directing the arrangements from the left-hand side of the stage.
Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again benefited from a mock-heroic delivery, whilst Boots of Spanish Leather had Dylan moving back and forth over the keyboards, exchanging smiles with bass player Tony Garnier and even affording the audience a cursory glance.
Yet it was the voice that impressed most - gravelly and aggressive during the encore of Like A Rolling Stone and crisp and punchy for the closing chorus of All Along the Watchtower.
There's certainly life in the old dog yet. - Brian O'Connell
The Poet and the Piper - Meeting House Square, Dublin
The spare elegance of this performance was a timely reminder that less is indeed more. It was a snapshot of what might be, as well as what is, with Seamus Heaney in particular suggesting that just because the opening salvos of the 21st century "have been more fist than shaking hand", it doesn't have to be that way.
Liam Ó Floinn is the perfect foil for Heaney. He may be a man of few words but he plays the uilleann pipes with the fluency of a polyglot, as conversant with life's unspoken intricacies as Heaney is. His decision to include the suite The Foxhunt, preceding it with a colourful exposition of each turn and twist of the hunt, afforded him the chance to bend and stretch the notes with all the agility of an acrobat, uncannily echoing the craftsmanship of the blacksmith, a trade that proved to be a touchstone for a number of Heaney's poems throughout the evening.
Poetry and piping make cosy bedfellows. The imagination is tickled, ideas are conjured, and both are given life by the oxygen-rich bellows of the pipes. Seamus Heaney trawled through four decades of his own work, to draw together such diverse snapshots as St Kevin And The Blackbird (in all its egoless contemplation), A Call and Fiddlehead Ferns, the latter a playful jeu d'esprit that tickled both the poet's and our funny bones.
Heaney spoke in Tate's Avenue of the sublime moment when "I had your measure and you had mine", and that was precisely what he and Ó Floinn achieved with their wide sweeping repertoire. Criss-crossing through a delicious excerpt from The Brendan Voyage titled Water Under The Keel, echoing Heaney's reading of An Bonnán Buí, and then finally coasting to a close with a subtle tribute to the poet with his self-composed Mossbawn, Ó Floinn's piping was the ideal foundation stone on which Heaney could lay his filigree verse, where every syllable knew its place intuitively. A magical night of words and music. - Siobhán Long
West Cork Chamber Music Festival - Bantry House, Co Cork
The first of Sunday's concerts at the festival was a doubly unusual affair. Trumpet and piano recitals are rare enough, but this one by Mark O'Keeffe and Charles Owen also featured the premiere of a new work for trumpet and electronics by Stephen Gardner.
Gardner's is not a name you would immediately associate with electronics, so it's hardly surprising that he used his time in the studio to unorthodox if perfectly clear ends.
Taking the jazz association of the trumpet as the obvious lead, he seems to have set out to emulate the sound world of a jazz band. But he did it in a way that allows the recorded "band" a kind of shape-changing freedom that's the musical equivalent of the digital special effects from a Hollywood blockbuster.
Sketches of Pain sets the trumpet and electronics against one another, sometimes gently, sometimes in an almost frenzied opposition. Mark O'Keeffe's performance was at its most successful when the penetrating thinness of muted trumpet readily unlocked the ambience of jazz.
O'Keeffe presented Luciano Berio's Sequenza X for trumpet and piano resonance as rather too much of a struggle between musical demands and performer's lip. It was only in the final home straight that he seemed to find the necessary freedom of gesture.
It was interesting, however, to hear the piece in such a small performing space, where the clarity of the shifting piano resonances was exemplary. It was in Hindemith's Sonata for Trumpet and Piano that O'Keeffe and Owen sounded most comfortable, though the excursions into extremely high volume removed any possibility of comfort for the audience.
The day's performing highlight was provided by the T'ang Quartet in another minor work from the 1920s, Pavel Haas's Quartet No. 2, the colourfully titled, From the Monkey Mountains of 1925.
Haas, who was born in 1899 and died in Auschwitz in 1944, studied with Janácek, and it shows in the motivic working and unusual interjections of the music.
The pictorialism of this summer-holiday inspired piece is all Haas's own, and the T'ang's rigorously modernistic approach made its every twist and turn sound distinctive.
The ASCH Trio offered a variable performance of Mozart's great Divertimento in E flat for string trio, that erred, sometimes interestingly, on the clinical side. The Prazák Quartet were romantically attuned to Haydn's Rider Quartet (Op 74 No 3), and the RTÉ Vanbrughs played Beethoven's late Quartet in A minor with a fine-spun fragility.
The French cello and piano duo of Emmanuelle Bertrand and Pascal Amoyel also presented a beautiful sounding but altogether too muted reading of Richard Strauss's teenage Sonata in F. - Michael Dervan
Colm Carey (organ) - St Michael's Church, Dún Laoghaire, Co Dublin
Bach - Eight Short Preludes and Fugues BWV553-560. Schübler Chorale Preludes BWV645-650. Larghetto BWV972. Prelude and Fugue in G BWV541.
There was a bit of a riddle to this organ recital, the third in this year's summer series in Dún Laoghaire: despite having an all-Bach programme, only the final Prelude and Fugue in G were originally written by Bach for the organ.
And in the case of the Eight Short Preludes and Fugues, as soloist Colm Carey explained, the authorship is disputed and the pieces not reckoned to be by Bach at all. "But," said the Dublin-born, Cork- raised Carey, who is both Belfast City Organist and Organist to Her Majesty's Chapel Royal at the Tower of London, "they are fun to play and fun to listen to." Which was exactly how he played them, with an air of amused relish as he easily underscored the different technical features so prominently - unsubtly, even - showcased by the composer in each one.
He offered a contrasting mood of concentration and seriousness in a couple of the fugues, but levity returned courtesy of the jigging footwork required in the pedals-only passages of the preludes from BWV557 and 560.
The riddle-programme continued with the Schübler chorale preludes, none original organ pieces, being instead transcriptions of movements from various cantatas. Here Carey combined meticulousexactness with playing of real warmth, whether in the melancholy little alto tune of BWV646 (all that survives of a lost cantata) or in the demanding violin obbligato of a movement from Cantata 137, Lobe den Herren.
Next was an arrangement of an arrangement: the Larghetto movement from Carey's own arrangement of Bach's transcription for harpischord of a violin concerto by Vivaldi. It is faithful to the spirit and sound of both composers, and its gentle air proved a glad addition to the programme.
The recital ended with the Prelude and Fugue in G BWV541, the evening's only original organ work by Bach. Here Carey provided a glimpse of reserves of depth and intensity he had not much needed to call on previously, drawing out and building on the energy latent in all the repetition that features in the prelude, and negotiating the fugue's motivic density with both intelligence and, above all, expressivity. - Michael Dungan
