A round-up of reviews from Irish Timeswriters:
Attempts on Her Life
Project Cube, Dublin
At the beginning of Attempts on Her Life, "seventeen scenarios for theatre" by Martin Crimp, the principle character appears to be unreachable.
As answering-machine messages accumulate, various voices suggest a different version of someone called Anne: lover, artist, consumer, suicidal depressive, international terrorist.
The possibilities are infinite. Not only will we never lay eyes on Anne - or Annie, or Anya, or Annushka, as she is variously described - but Crimp's 1997 play is, essentially, an onstage identity crisis.
A stylistic collage of various attempts to define Anne, the play offers no plot, no payoff, no political coherency, no moral certainty and, more to the point, no actual characters. All the director and the company have to go on are the words, a giddying and sometimes coruscating tumult of dialogue.
Tom Creed's meticulously considered and restlessly imaginative production for Rough Magic takes this overload of text and, unfettered by subtext or context, zips along through movie pitches, a rock song, a seance, a late-night arts review and a police incident room. The result is something as stylish as it is engaging, both ineffably cool and heaps of fun.
In Crimp's gleefully postmodern collage, style is at least as important as content. Designer Conor Murphy's response might look unpromisingly bare: a white space pocked with pores, but under the hypnotic glow of Sinead McKenna's lights it transforms from display-window unreality to post-apocalyptic wasteland. Meanwhile, dressed in the pleasingly synthetic hues of children's TV presenters, a marvellous six-strong cast effect as many bright shifts.
Kathy Kiera Clarke can be a sought-after movie starlet one moment, or the barracked narrator of a harrowing story later on. Rory Nolan may sing lead vocals on a rock song (its tune, by Denis Clohessy, dragged down by Crimp's verbiage), then deliver an amusing monologue with an unnerving twist. Hilary O'Shaughnessy gets easily the most startling sequence, though, advertising a new make of car (the Anny) in dulcet Polish tones, while her sales speak warps into human rights abuses and ethnic cleansing: "No room for gypsies, Arabs, Jews, Turks, Kurds, Blacks or any of that human scum," translates Darragh Kelly, tightly.
Crimp's fin de siècle political flippancy and formal fragmentation is bound to leave some people cold. But Creed finds the relevance in so fractured a view of identity and the world around us. Like the snapped fingers in a show tune or a random trail of weblinks, it simply clicks with us. By the time the stage has filled with clutter and chatter, a picture of Anne emerges; a character made conspicuous by her absence. - Peter Crawley
Jazz On The Terrace
Blue Note, Capel Street, Dublin
The headliner for the 25th anniversary celebrations of Allen Smith's Jazz On The Terrace organisation was the Italian singer, Maria Pia De Vito. She didn't disappoint. Despite minimal rehearsal, both she and the musicians supporting her - Francesco Turrisi (piano), Ronan Guilfoyle (bass) and Mike Nielsen (guitar) - produced a cohesive and original concert.
With not a standard in sight, almost all the repertoire consisted of her distinctive originals, some with a whiff of contemporary Naples. The past also took a bow, with a 15th-century Neapolitan villanella, Voccucia de no Pierfeco, arranged by herself, with delightful accompaniment by Turrisi, along with a traditional song, Scalimatella.
The Neapolitan touch was also evident in her vocal approach, where the material called for it.
But she can also scat brilliantly; G .Continuo, Fitto di sape 'ojuocco, Scugniffeideand, above all, Solo, where she built up vocal layers electronically and improvised over them, were striking examples of her musicality and implacable time.
The music also owed much of its impact to the sensitivity of her support. Nielsen, in particular, somehow managed to capture an idiomatically vocal quality in his guitar solos on Scalimatella, Paradisoand Scugnizzeide, a tribute to his capacity for grasping what one imagines is the idiomatic essence of the material.
But Turrisi, an exceptional pianist, and Guilfoyle also made impressive use of the repertoire's sometimes slender harmonic resources when called on the solo. And the absence of drums arguably gave the performance a combination of delicacy and buoyancy that clarified the quartet's individual voices. An aptly titled Afterthought, by John Taylor, completed an immensely satisfying programme.
Earlier, the very capable Brussels-based pianist, Ivan Paduart, led a pickup group completed by Joe O'Callaghan (guitar), Simon Jermyn (bass) and Dan Jacobson (drums).
Most of the material was the pianist's compositions, with a couple of standards, I'll Remember Apriland Stella By Starlight, to round out the programme. Notwithstanding some rough edges - it was the old story of too little rehearsal time - the results were enjoyable, with O'Callaghan confirming his talent in what, for him, must have been a more conventional milieu than he has usually been heard in here. - Ray Comiskey
Hagner, RTÉ NSO/Anissimov
NCH, Dublin
Stravinsky - Firebird Suite (1919)
Prokofiev - Violin Concerto No 2
Rachmaninov - Symphony No 2
The Russian conductor Alexander Anissimov first came to Ireland for the Wexford Festival of 1993. He was soon taken up by the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra, and quickly became a favourite with Irish audiences.
He's been, in turn, principal guest conductor, principal conductor, and conductor emeritus of the RTÉ NSO.
But the formal association is soon to end. Friday's concert at the NCH marked his last subscription series appearance as conductor emeritus, and he has just two more concerts scheduled with the orchestra, at the end of June, before his contract expires in August.
Russian music in general, and the music of Sergei Rachmaninov in particular, has had a strong presence in his work in Ireland. With the RTÉ NSO, made a memorable series of Rachmaninov recordings for Naxos, and he returned to the composer's second symphony again on Friday.
It would be a pleasure to record that Anissimov is leaving the orchestra with the kind of style and panache he started out with. But, sadly, that is not the case. Somewhere along the line something went awry.
He used to deliver performances of Rachmaninov's obsessively melancholic second symphony that were flexibly lush and complex. The clarity was impeccable, the textures always finely wrought. The long, recursive melodies used to be handled with a remarkable, self-renewing quality, so that one hardly noticed the extent to which Rachmaninov worked the same ground, again and again.
On Friday, the style was much stiffer, often bright and brittle, the brass playing much louder and coarser than of old, and less persuasively imposing. Yes, many of the old inclinations could be sensed, but the delivery was effectively a black-and-white version of something that used to be sumptuously coloured. It was still an audience-pleaser of a performance, but without the subtlety that used to make Anissimov's work so special.
The altogether more fantastical opulence of Stravinsky's Firebird Suitewas communicated with greater immediacy, and the inclinations that delivered some exaggerated kish-boom effects in the Rachmaninov also brought the expected shockwave at the start of The Infernal Dance of King Kashchei.
Viviane Hagner, the soloist in Prokofiev's second violin concerto, took a decidedly cool slant on a work that features some of the composer's warmest melodic writing.
Her playing was impressive in its technical control but her approach limited the expressive yield.
On this occasion, the music-making of a player who has impressed in past appearances in Bantry and Dublin verged beyond the clean and towards the antiseptic. - Michael Dervan
