Irish Times writers review four recent musical performances.
Trpceski, RTÉ NSO/Eddins
NCH
Grieg - Peer Gynt Suite No 1
Prokofiev - Piano Concerto No 3
Einojuhani Rautavaara - Adagio celeste
Sibelius - Symphony No 5
Sibelius and Grieg are a favourite combination with orchestral programmers. They appeared together once again in Friday's RTÉ NSO programme under William Eddins, this time with a little extra twist in the form of another work from northern Europe, Finnish composer Einojuhani Rautavaara's Adagio celesteof 2000.
The evergreen tunefulness of the popular suites from Grieg's music for Ibsen's play Peer Gyntrarely fails to please. The high point of William Eddins's performance of the first suite was not the exciting build-up of In the Hall of the Mountain Kingbut rather the tender sadness of The Death of Ase.
Rautavaara's Adagio celesteis a reserved expression of resignation and longing that, at least in this performance, sounded diffuse and anodyne.
Eddins often dug gutsily into the melodic lines of Sibelius's Fifth Symphony, but the opening movement's long build-up somehow remained strangely short on tension. It was as if the conductor was more interested in passing details of colour and texture than in establishing a firm sense of direction. The effect was not uninteresting, but it was only in the firmer tread of the finale that the performance established a really firm grip.
There was no lack of grip in Macedonian pianist Simon Trpceski's performance of Prokofiev's Third Concerto.
His playing was bright and alert and virtuosic enough to make playfully light of the music's technical demands. It's not often you get to hear this sometimes cheeky, sometimes sentimental, work played with such effortless insouciance. - Michael Dervan
Charlotte Hatherley
The Village, Dublin
Guitar rock doesn't do dainty. Against its phallocentric codes and male hang-ups one rarely "play" one's "instrument". One "shreds" one's "axe".
In such a world, the most radical thing an all-male rock group like Ash could have done 10 years ago was add a female member to their ranks.
Charlotte Hatherley, then a 17-year-old Londoner poached from a riot-girl group, gave Ash everything they needed: a new style, a better sound.
With her own writing efforts gracing a couple of the band's better B-sides, Hatherley's talent became too big to be contained. Last year, after the release of her first solo album, she left the boys behind and began work on her second.
A refreshing presence in guitar rock, Hatherley is very far from dainty. One single, the abrasively funny Bastardo, starts out as bubblegum pop before Hatherley steps on it and stretches the melody ragged with the sole of her shoe. It details a one-night stand with a nasty consequence: "And oh my beautiful guitar, that's what really broke my heart,/Had been stolen by the two-faced lothario."
Still adjusting to the attention of the spotlight, Hatherley flaunts less personality from the stage. Her small talk is kept to a minimum, her band set in silhouettes, while a merciless lighting operator routinely blinds the audience with floodlights.
The music still races and crackles, though, while making unexpected lurches. New songs I Want You To Know, Be Thankfuland Wounded Skyjostle happily with Kim Wilde.
Behave, from her upcoming album The Deep Blue, is a standout: the downtuned guitar lines become watery over the elastic snap of the bass, its melody queasy but fun.
Finishing with This is Pop, a buzzingly frenetic XTC cover, Hatherley may not have shrugged off her one-line biography yet ("former Ash guitarist"). But, given some time, an all-male Northern Irish rock group may yet become known as "former Hatherley bandmates". - Peter Crawley
Anthony Byrne (piano)
NCH, John Field Room
Liszt - François d'Assise, La prédication aux oiseaux
Les jeux d'eaux à la Villa d'Este Hungarian Rhapsody No 11
Valse - impromptu
Liebestraum No 3
Hungarian Rhapsody No 2
Pianist Anthony Byrne admits to having been a Lisztaholic since his early teens. One of the tracks on the first record he ever bought was the urbane Valse-impromptu, while the latest addition to his repertoire is the formidable Hungarian Rhapsody No 2.
Just how satisfyingly he brings off these hard-to-play pieces depends on what you look for in Romantic virtuosity.
You could say that there ought to be concern for the phrases and paragraphs that lurk below the music's scintillating surface textures. And since those textures are fastidiously contrived, they should be fastidiously executed.
But you could also say that the forms are trifling, that this music is nothing if not technically flamboyant. With notes rushing by more quickly than the ear can take them in, it's surely the effects, rather than the details, that matter.
In Liszt's portrayals of an avian sermon by St Francis, of the fountains at the Villa d'Este near Rome, and of the rapid chiming of a Hungarian cimbalom, Byrne's hyperactive trills and tremolandos showed his penchant for the broad gist and the grand gesture.
Each passage succeeded to the next in an avid and scurrying sequence, the recitative-like strains issuing with carefree dispatch. Not even did the relative tranquillity of the famous Liebestraum No 3 raise prospects of any lingering.
Things may have been omitted, scrambled, or glossed over. But the performance made its desired impression. - Andrew Johnstone
Biggs, Ó Cuinneagáin
Airfield House, Dublin
Schubert - Winterreise
Bass-baritone Conor Biggs is an artist who puts the music first. His response to the audience's rousing ovation for this performance of Winterreisewas to hold high the score and point to the composer's name. But he had already made his ardent devotion to Schubert abundantly clear.
This was his only recourse to the score. He knows these 24 songs backwards - literally, it turned out, because a freak page-turn caused his redoubtable accompanist Pádhraic Ó Cuinneagáin to play No 19 before No 18. But who cared? We got to hear No 19 a second time.
Apart from the flawless memory, the impeccable preparedness and the limpid German diction, what struck you about Biggs was his unusual knack of getting straight to the point. In every song's first syllable, the mood, the persona and the vocal colour were all immediately present and particular.
If his highest notes could err on the rowdy side, that was because of the depth and precedence of emotion.
Ó Cuinneagáin made the most of his baby grand's limited dynamics and rough damping, and turned out exactly the shape of accompaniment that Biggs required.
There's conspicuous affinity between these two musicians, and their tastes and talents found a close fit with Schubert's seminal cycle of Romantic song. - Andrew Johnstone.
