Reviewed today are All's Well That Ends Well at The Helix, Dublin and Ioudenitch, RTÉ NSO/Pearce at the NCH, Dublin

All's Well That Ends Well

The Helix, Dublin

All's well that begins well for Classic Stage Ireland: this new theatre company under the artistic direction of Andy Hinds has braved one of Shakespeare's rarely performed plays and thrown some welcome light on its obscurities.

With a plot borrowed from Boccacio's Decameron, it revolves around the unrequited love of a poor physician's daughter, Helena (Janet Moran) for a nobleman, Bertram (Peter Gaynor), and involves coercion, rejection, humiliation, betrayal, bribery and deception.

Although ending happily, as comedies must, it is undeniably equivocal: "All yet seems well" the King of France ventures tentatively in the final scene, but we're not so sure.

All the characters' motives are mixed, none of them is entirely likeable, and the combination of fantastic folk-tale elements, broad comedy and grim realism makes the work difficult to stage.

Echoes of many other, superior, Shakespeare plays abound: the most obvious similarities are to Measure for Measure, but at times the sulky, fatherless Bertram is reminiscent of Hamlet - without the wit or eloquence.

The ailing, Lear-like, French king, compellingly played by Laurence Foster, is made pivotal to this production which emphasises masculine vulnerability - a very 21st century theme, certainly, but one that is consistently elucidated by Andy Hinds's direction.

While the women scheme and cling, the men run away to war.

Speaking the verse with impressive clarity - marred occasionally by a tendency to shout - the cast's movements have ease and energy, bolstered by the restrained use of Conor Linehan's score.

While individual performances such as Eleanor Methven's and Stella McCusker's are memorable, the ensemble scenes are the most successful, particularly the humiliation of Bertram's Falstaffian side-kick, Parolles (Aidan Kelly) by his fellow soldiers.

"The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together" a courtier observes.

Classic Stage Ireland gives us an opportunity to see how this "problem play" presents a sense of moral ambivalence that seems very contemporary. This production runs until Saturday, July 3rd.

Helen Meany

Ioudenitch, RTÉ NSO/Pearce

NCH, Dublin

Tchaikovsky - Romeo and Juliet.

Saint-Saëns - Piano Concerto No 2.

Rimsky-Korsakov - Sheherazade.

The Uzbek pianist Stanislav Ioudenitch shared the top prize at the 2001 Van Cliburn Competition in Fort Worth with Russian pianist Olga Kern. And he also came away with an award for the best performance of chamber music, which he shared with Maxim Philippov (beaten into joint second place at the Texas competition) and Davide Franceschetti (first prizewinner at the Dublin International Piano Competition in 1994, who was eliminated in the second round at Fort Worth).

Ioudenitch made his Dublin debut with the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra under Colman Pearce on Friday playing the second and best-known of Saint-Saëns's five piano concertos.

Saint-Saëns's virtuoso vehicle - written in 1868 for a concert with the composer as soloist and the great Anton Rubinstein conducting - gave Ioudenitch ample opportunity to reveal an easy-sounding technical grasp which seemed to leave him unfazed by this concerto's peculiar demands.

"Art," maintained Saint-Saëns, "has the right to descend into the abyss, to insinuate itself into the secret folds of dark and distressed souls." But he made his own view clear by adding, "This right is not a duty."

His position has opened his work to accusations of shallowness, and Ioudenitch's musical sympathies were not on this occasion complete enough to banish thoughts of such charges. For all the moment-by-moment brilliance, he didn't quite find the appropriate delivery for the neo-classical rhetoric with which Saint-Saëns opens the concerto, or indeed the Mendelssohnian fleetness of the two movements which follow.

Both the music's cleverness and bonhomie were under-sold in his performance.

Colman Pearce was a warm-hearted if not always tidily co-ordinated accompanist. The performances of the Russian masterworks that opened and closed the concert were ample-toned and full-blooded - Pearce is not a man who cares much to discourage the heavy brass. The strength of the music-making lay more in the consistency of emotional thrust than in any subtleties of musical detailing.

Michael Dervan