Irish Times writers review a concert by reunited folksters Simon and Garfunkel
Simon & Garfunkel
Early in 1966, childhood friends Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel were sitting in a car, sharing a smoke and listening to the radio.
When the number one record was announced - The Sound of Silence by Simon & Garfunkel - Art turned to Paul and said, "Those guys must be having so much fun!"
As the RDS swooned to the ghostly shimmer of that ageless tune last Saturday, ringing with perfect harmonies and "songs that voices never share", it again encapsulated one of music's greatest and most fraught partnerships: Hello darkness, my old friend.
Reunited for their first Irish concert in 22 years, their opening song, Old Friends, sounded like a fragile truce: "Can you imagine us years from today," sang Simon, "sharing a park bench quietly?" Well, if strategically positioned microphones are anything to go by, then, frankly, no.
Though their eyes rarely met, I Am a Rock proved that great music isn't always founded on a cosy alliance. But after a simply gorgeous Kathy's Song, Garfunkel capped the moment by shaking Simon's hand; the singer graciously deferring to the songwriter.
They even atoned for ripping off The Everly Brothers in high school, by welcoming the pair to the stage for a mini-set of close harmony purity and rock'n'roll swagger.
After that - you name it, they played it: Scarborough Fair, Homeward Bound, Mrs Robinson, El Condor Pasa, and, um, Slip Slidin' Away.
Never resorting to a grumbling retread, nor threatening new material, hits were faithfully rendered and subtly re-sculpted - making a live CD a mouth-watering proposition.
And although Simon magnanimously applauds Garfunkel's tear-jerking performance of Bridge Over Troubled Water (the anthem of support and friendship that naturally precipitated their break-up), they address the audience like a divorced couple with joint-custody of the kids, dividing the acclaim rather than sharing it.
As a wonderful evening closes on the unabashedly groovy note of 59th Street Bridge Song, those guys must finally be having so much fun.
Peter Crawley
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Kerr, RTÉ NSO/Houlihan
NCH, Dublin
Bizet - Symphony in C.
Debussy - La mer.
Chausson - Poème de l'amour et de la mer.
Ravel - La valse.
The Irish conductor Robert Houlihan has been one of the most consistent advocates of French repertoire in the schedules of the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra.
Fond memories of many of his performances in this area of repertoire were not added to by last Friday's programme of Bizet, Debussy, Chausson and Ravel.
Those characteristics which made Houlihan's best work special were not strongly in evidence.
For instance, the internal orchestral balances on Friday often allowed hierarchical domination by strength, resulting in much masking of the woodwind, and the freshness of approach that was once so striking simply wasn't to be found.
Houlihan responded to the tunefulness of Bizet's youthful Symphony in C, a mid-19th century symphony created very directly after the classical models of the 18th century. But the effervescence which can make this work so irresistible didn't materialise.
In Debussy's La mer it was the stormy passages of the third movement which fared best. But the strange prominence allowed to the glockenspiel at various times had already consigned this performance to the realm of the absurd.
Soprano Virginia Kerr has a style that wouldn't seem by nature to be well suited to Chausson's Poème de l'amour et de la mer.
On Friday she tended to force her tone, her vibrato was too ample and too consistent for the music, and her articulation of the text often impenetrable.
She reached her sensitive best in the final part, paring down her delivery and easing the pressure to convey the necessary sense of morbid calm. The most successful moments in the extravagance that is Ravel's La valse came through the buttery melting smoothness that Houlihan brought to some of the quietest moments on the strings.
In general, though, too much that needed to stand out clearly remained embedded in the orchestration.
The sense of discovery, of revelation, that Houlihan can achieve when on top form seemed all too far away.
Michael Dervan
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NCC/Antunes
National Gallery, Dublin
Morales - Missa de
Beata Vergine.
Anon (Cyprus, ca 1400) - Gloria. Sanctus in eternis. Certes me fout.
Balzano - Missa Brevis.
David del Puerto - Espacio de la Luz.
The National Chamber Choir's Ad Multos Annos series has been celebrating music from the new member-states of the European Union for the 150th anniversary of the National Gallery (through a series of painting-related commissions), and has placed a major Mass setting in each of the programmes.
Last Thursday's music gave a fair idea of the unusual scope of the enterprise.
The sections of the Missa de Beata Vergine by the 16th-century Spanish composer Cristóbal de Morales were interspersed with other music - three pieces from early 15th century Cyprus, a Mass by the 17th century Maltese composer Giuseppe Balzano - and the programme was rounded off with the specially commissioned Espacio de la Luz by Spaniard David del Puerto (born 1964), inspired by Francisco de Zurbarán's Immaculada Concepción.
As ever in artistic director Celso Antunes's performances with the NCC, the interpretative slant varied greatly from piece to piece, the Morales flowing mellifluosly, the pieces from Cyprus more blunt, energetic and angular, the rigid matching of words and music sometimes causing the soprano line to spill out the words with disorienting speed.
The antiphonal writing of Balzano's Missa Brevis makes use of the simple-sounding harmonic progressions employed by some of the greatest composers of the 17th century, but without generating the richness of expressive glow or even momentarily the resplendence that greater masters have commanded with similar means.
One of the challenges facing a composer taking a painting as the starting point for a choral work is the selection of a text.
David del Puerto opted to write his own Marian eulogy, for which he composed a score of sinuous, writhing counterpoint.
The intensity of the work is oddly gauged, the effect of the dissonant choral lines often sounding to be self-cancelling, the periodic trailing off into single line offering not so much relief, as the moments of sharpest, most telling focus.
The wonder of the evening was not so much the unusual selection of music or the choir's adaptability in performing it.
Rather, it is that the NCC has identified itself to and is rewarding an enthusiastic audience every bit as numerous as that for the safe and staid offerings it presented only a couple of years ago.
Michael Dervan
The NCC's Ad Multos Annos series continues at the National Gallery on Thursday, July 29th (01-700 5665).
