The Irish Times takes a look at what is happening in the world of the arts
Bill Frisell, Martin Hayes, Dennis Cahill
Vicar Street
In music, as in life, there are mixed marriages, mismatches and shotgun weddings. Born of mutual respect and admiration, the encounter between the great traditional fiddler Martin Hayes, his duo colleague Dennis Cahill, and the equally pre-eminent jazz guitarist Bill Frisell, somehow managed to encompass all three.
Idiomatically it was a mixed marriage, stylistically it was a mismatch and, as a partnership that could only function with the complete, or almost complete, compromise of one party, it was a shotgun wedding. And the attempt to consummate it didn't come off.
This is not a flippant dismissal of marvellously gifted musicians. As someone who is not a fan of traditional music, this reviewer marvelled at Hayes's performance, both as a solo fiddler and in duo with rhythm guitarist Dennis Cahill.
His timing was impeccable, his virtuoso playing warm, sweet and flowing, superbly articulated and with an authentically, expressively malleable tone and attack; a touch flamboyant, perhaps, but a joy to hear.
Traditional fans, of which the audience seemed mostly to consist, loved it - and deservedly so.
Frisell, who followed Hayes's solo opening spot with an unaccompanied spot of his own, gave jazz fans an all-too-brief chance to savour his unique style. He's a wonderful rubato player, among other things, with an engagingly oblique way of sidling up to a tune before shedding his own light on it; his When You Wish Upon A Star was a lovely example of his unmistakeable approach.
However when he was part of the trio to close the first set and during the second, the music was largely in the traditional idiom, or as close as makes little difference. In this setting, his role shrank to that of a minor colourist or, despite the presence of Cahill, of rhythm guitarist, while Hayes, at home in his own element, dominated.
The results may have satisfied traditional fans, but the anticipated mingling of idioms mostly didn't happen. Indeed, the closer it got to the jazz elements the more muted became the music. Thelonious Monk's Misterioso was polite pleasantry with no bite, for example; frustrating, certainly to a jazz fan - and possibly not as satisfying to traditionalists, either.
Mark this idea down as the one that got away.
Ray Comiskey
Can You See Me Now?;
Nine Years
IFSC, Dublin and online;
SS Michael and John
On the first day of Can You See Me Now?, a technologically dizzying yet dirt-simple chasing game, two runners were challenged by an IFSC security guard to produce a permit. A permit for what, one of them wondered. "For whatever it is that you're doing," the guard replied.
They certainly seemed subversive. Dressed in black and equipped with GPS devices, PDAs, earpieces and walkie- talkies, members of Brighton- based performance group Blast Theory prowled the area like a Swat team. The futuristic get-up was necessary to interact with up to 15 online players, who were simultaneously playing the game online, roaming through a 3D rendering of the same space; virtual trespassers in a Sim city.
On the first day of the game, I got the chance to be a "guest runner" with the company, which felt a bit like joining forces with the ghosts in Pac-Man.
Dashing through the lunchtime bustle of the IFSC there were, inevitably, technical difficulties - the most common being an issue with "connectivity", as GPS devices lost responsiveness.
Connectivity, however, is the soul of Can You See Me Now?, where the running jokes of the company and subversive efforts of regular players create fluid communication between real and virtual presences.
"I am in hot pursuit of Nobody InParticular," a Blast Theory runner might say, then gamely announce, "I can see NoReason ToContinue." Game Over, then.
That could have been an alternative title for Nine Years, a curious career retrospective from the Brighton-based performance group Lone Twin.
Intrepid travellers Gregg Whelan and Gary Winters presented a lecture-cum-video exhibition of their global adventures, 12-hour-blindfolded- line-dancing installations, 12- hour cycling expeditions and 18- hour-holding-hands-on-a-bridge- somewhere events: in short, their life's work. Such durational shenanigans, presented with endearing faux naivety, are rather familiar to the gentler spectrum of live art.
But the structure of the show, with its repetition and variation, or plot points that are planted early and pay off later, suggest Whelan and Winters owe just as much to traditional narrative techniques.
Resolving their heaving, haphazard journeys with a pat-happy ending and the glib suggestion of accidental matchmaking, it may be Lone Twin have come to question their own connectivity.
Blast Theory's hyper-sociable matrix never entertained such doubts. Their art simply brings people together.
Peter Crawley
Dublin County Choir and Orchestra/Block
NCH, Dublin
Bach - St John Passion
This Dublin County Choir performance of Bach's St John Passion was dedicated to the memory of its founder, the late Éamonn Kealy. It was an occasion of good intentions and very mixed achievement.
Conductor Colin Block chose to perform the work in English so that the audience could "better experience every twist and turn of the plot". Yet, from where I sat, most of the choral singing was indecipherable without the printed text, and some of the solo contributions too.
Happily, the shining exception was the Evangelist of the tenor, John Elwes, who sustained the central narrative with an edge- of-the-seat immediacy. It's Elwes's gift to give the impression that he has captured every layer of meaning in the Gospel text and found the surest musical inflection to communicate it with a voice that's clear and true and touching.
There were a few high-lying moments where he momentarily faltered, but even these could almost be explained away - it was as if in the heat of the moment he was overcome by the gravity of his message.
Soprano Anna Devin and bass Philip O'Reilly were in firm, if less illuminating form. The Jesus of bass Jeffrey Ledwidge was vocally effective but rather flat in feeling, while the contributions of tenor Éamonn Mulhall and mezzo soprano Máire Flavin were less consistent, with hardly a word of Flavin's singing coming across clearly.
Colin Block is a conductor who is rarely short of ideas and always goes out of his way to make his intentions clear. On this occasion he seemed to be over- conducting and his shaping of the music often sounded as if imposed artificially from without. The unconvincingly brisk tempos he set for some of the arias certainly did not make life easy for the soloists.
Neither the playing of the orchestra nor the choral singing were particularly tidy and, although the internal clarity of the choruses was often high, the sense of strain and raggedness in the individual lines suggested that the Dublin County Choir is currently well off the peak of its form.
Michael Dervan
