Reviews

Irish Times writers review a selection of events.

Irish Timeswriters review a selection of events.

Pavel Haas String Quartet Killruddery House, Bray

Mozart - Adagio and Fugue in C minor K546. Dvorak - Quartet in F Op 96 (American). Pavel Haas - Quartet No 2 (From the Monkey Mountains)

For a composer whose music was suppressed in his lifetime, who died in a gas chamber at Auschwitz, and whose work remained in obscurity for nearly half a century after his death, Pavel Haas is now doing rather well. This Czech composer's magnum opus, the opera Sarlatan, lay neglected for 60 years after its 1938 premiere, before appearing on disc in 1998 (in Decca's Entartete Musik series) and later that year in a new production at the Wexford Festival.

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There is now even a Czech chamber music ensemble that has adopted his name, and the group made its Irish debut here in the Music in Great Irish Houses festival at Killruddery House, Co Wicklow.

The group offered the second Irish performance of Haas's Second String Quartet of 1925, which carries the colourful nickname From the Monkey Mountains, a description that Haas expert Lubomir Peduzzi says was used by young people in the Czech city of Brno in the 1920s to describe the Czech-Moravian Highlands. The piece is actually a programmatic suite, its four movements entitled Landscape, Horse, Cart and Driver, The Moon and I, and A Wild Night.

The piece's Irish premiere was given at the West Cork Chamber Music Festival last year by the T'ang Quartet from Singapore, and the performances of the two groups could hardly have been more different.

The T'angs, who have made something of a speciality of Czech music, tackled the piece from a forward-looking, modernist perspective. The Czech players emphasized the connections with Haas's teacher, Janacek, and sought out the music's lyricism.

This performance also restored the percussion part from the fourth movement, which the composer withdrew after it met a hostile reception at the first performance. it worked so well that no one is likely to have objected.

The programme also included one of the world's all-time favourite quartets, Dvorak's American, and Mozart's Adagio and Fugue in C minor. The Pavel Haas Quartet played both with unmannered freshness, and showed an exceptional skill in drawing the most intense expression from moments of the softest inwardness. Michael Dervan

A Cloud's Journey/HaHaHa

Draíocht, Blanchardstown

The recent Spréacha arts festival for children included a wide variety of imported entertainment for the young folk. From Germany came A Cloud's Journey by Schnawl Kinder und JugendTheater, in the person here of a young man who charmed his audience of three- to six-year-olds before his show began, asking them to turn off their mobiles - to which one diminutive tot chirruped that she had left hers at home.

Then to an absorbing story of a small cloud explaining the sights of the world she sees on her travels. With the aid of an array of boxes with appropriate paintings on their different sides, the cloud took us to oceans, deserts, the icy north and tropical jungles. For each of these, we were introduced to flora and fauna, from orchids to tigers, snakes to giraffes. The degree of transformation created by the actor-narrator with his minimal but hugely imaginative props was quite amazing.

Involving the audience while keeping them under reasonable control is quite a trick, but the charismatic host had the knack. When not making them jump as with the savagery of the polar bear, he mingled with his guests, letting them feel the cloud, fluffy and soft, and enjoy other points of contact; the perfect host for a real treat.

Anyone over seven was welcome at HaHaHa, in which a duo of red-nosed clowns engaged in some unusual cavortings. The two men, dressed in off-white baggies, got laughs at their very appearance and squeaky word-sounds, in a get-to-know-you warm-up.

This was followed by a number of comic acts, some a mixture of juggling and acrobatics. A football contest saw a degree of precision that dazzled the eye, including a kind of marsupial ball-disappearance by one contestant using an unsuspected pouch. This morphed into a highly competitive number using a large number of empty cardboard boxes, climaxing in the building of a high tower allowed to lean out over the front seats, but miraculously not to fall.

More along these lines included traditional acrobatics with a comic twist and cleverly cushioned falls. The notion of the two clowns as rivals in endeavour permeated the show, and when they finally walked into the shadows, by now reconciled, they had earned their applause. Gerry Colgan

Colin Currie

National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin

The oldest music in percussionist Colin Currie's lunchtime concert dated from 1982. It was a programme full of fresh, interesting, mostly short pieces.

He opened with works for marimba, of which he is a master. Even if you're used to percussion concerts, the mind boggles, not just at the playing of four sticks with only two hands over five octaves. It's his control of touch and tone, of inner voices coming forward and then receding as distinctly and subtly as if he were a pianist, of rhythms and counter-rhythms.

There was a suave, mesmeric effect in both the 1999 Ghanaia by Matthias Schmitt, influenced by musical experiences during a trip to Ghana, and in the 1994 Nagoya Marimbas by American minimalist Steve Reich. This was effectively a duet for two marimbas, the second part pre-recorded by Currie. Even though it was just two instruments and based simply on pentatonic figures, the impression was of many more voices and much more going on.

Rather different from these marimba pieces was See Ya Thursday by Princeton professor of composition and self- confessed "dated rock guitarist" Steven Mackey. Here, instead of continuous cycles and subtle transitions, was story-telling through music, an exploration of the marimba built around the rising and falling phases of narrative structure.

The "old" 1982 piece was Fire Over Water, the exciting finale to a quartet of pieces called I Ching by Denmark's Per Norgard. Mostly for nine drums, this contained the most volume and aggression of the afternoon.

Perhaps the most engaging music came from English composer Dave Maric, a classical pianist whose wide tastes also include jazz, pop and electronic music. His eclecticism is fully evident in the 2002 Sense and Innocence, which combines a wide array of percussion with pre-recorded and sampled percussion sounds. Here, even more than in the 2001 Trilogy commissioned by Currie, there was an other-worldly atmosphere, sometimes vaguely tinted with funk, often deriving its forward energy from weird ostinatos, availing of countless sounds and colours, and all demonstrating the immense concentration and expressive control of the performer. Michael Dungan

Siobhán Kilkelly (organ) St Michael's Church, Dún Laoghaire

Bach - Prelude and Fugue in A minor BWV543. Boëly - Andante un poco sostenuto Op 43 No 8. Fantaisie and Fugue Op 18 No 6. Franck - Pastorale. Vierne - Hymne au Soleil. Sicilienne. Résignation. Toccata.

Siobhán Kilkelly is organist and choir director of Monkstown Parish Church, and a lecturer in piano at DIT. Here, she chose a programme that focused on French and German repertoire, tracing a line of connections from the 18th century of Bach's mighty Prelude and Fugue in A Minor through to a selection of Louis Vierne's Pièces de Fantaisie from the 1920s.

The Bach was given in a firm, monolithic style, the effect being not unlike that of a hearty, healthy meal that's more fibre than flavour. The two pieces by Alexandre Pierre François Boëly (1785-1858), a composer Kilkelly has studied in depth, served as a useful reminder of the forward-looking romantically-oriented chromaticism of a minor composer whose name lives on primarily through his organ music.

Franck's Pastorale, a difficult undertaking on the forward-sounding Rieger organ of St Michael's, came across a little stiffly. It was in the closing pieces by Vierne that Kilkelly sounded her best. Hymne au Soleil and Toccata, with which she framed her selection, were thoroughly invigorating. Michael Dervan