Susan Conley reviews the first offering by Muse Productions; Martin Adams praises the natural musicianship of harpist Dianne Marshall and Dermot Gault spends a hot summer's night with the Ulster Orchestra and Alexander Anissimov.
About the Days, Project Cube
The first offering by Muse Productions is not a full out production per se, but rather a work-in-progress; nevertheless, the work was presented to an audience, and some rules of criticism must apply.
The show, a meeting of director Yvonne O'Reilly with four of Dublin's finest actors working with texts from Irish fiction writers that featured in The Stinging Fly magazine, calls to mind the virtues of well-produced radio plays, not necessarily visually exciting theatre making.
O'Reilly and producer Maureen Buggy have certainly culled the right talent for each piece, with Charlie Bonner, Olwen Fouere, Rachel Hanna, and Andrew Bennett all lending their talents to various tales of familial bitterness, desolation, hopelessness, whimsy, and the invisible tracks left as one life crosses another.
The stagings are simple, with the exception of Hanna's performance piece, written by Michael Gleeson, which lends its name to the evening: a more sophisticated lighting plan was involved in the short but precise slice of inner city life.
Bonner was cheekily dark in On The Lake by Michael Wynne; we were deprived of Fouere's usual riveting presence as her presentation of Susan Knight's
The Meadow was recorded; and Bennett did double duty with Paul Lenehan's A Short History of Italy, and the moving and wonderfully wrought A Basket Full of Wallpaper by Colum McCann.
The stories and writers were the real stars of the night; the execution is still very much the work-in-progress part.
The promise of innovative use of sound was not delivered upon, as musical motifs merely introduced and lead us out of each piece.
With time, one hopes, Muse will expand upon their good instincts as regards acting and writing talent, and develop the stagings to match.
Dianne Marshall (harp), NCH John Field Room
C.P.E. Bach: Sonata in G; Debussy: Clair de lune; Tournier: Au matin; Paul Patterson: Spiders; Bell, Aine Ní Dhúill (arr.): Traditional Irish airs; Salzedo: Chanson dans la nuit; Smetana, trans. Trnecek: Fantasy on the Moldau.
Dianne Marshall is in her mid-twenties and has a long history as a harpist in concert music and traditional Irish music.
Her lunchtime recital at the National Concert Hall's John Field Room last Friday covered both areas, and included some interesting transcriptions.
There seems little doubt that Hans Trnecek's neat arrangement of Smetana's Moldau works primarily as a cipher, and is therefore more likely to be appreciated by those who know the richness of the original.
However, it works, and is especially effective at capturing the contrast between rich melody and rhapsodic, water-inspired burbling.
Works composed specifically for harp stood out for their idiomatic flair; and in them Dianne Marshall was most fully at-home. The various arrangements of traditional Irish airs represented one side of that authenticity.
The other was represented by the French-style virtuosity of Salzedo's Chanson dans la nuit and Tournier's Au matin and, best of all, by Paul Patterson's Spiders.
These tightly drawn character pieces stood out for their mastery of technique and idea - for a level of purely musical thinking which one could only admire. One of these original compositions might have made a better opening to the concert than C.P.E. Bach's Sonata in G, a demanding transcription of a keyboard work.
Sometimes Dianne Marshall needed to reach out to her audience more than she did - to convince as well as to play.
Yet in every item she showed a rounded and serious kind of natural musicianship; and that made this concert a consistently enjoyable occasion.
Ulster Orchestra/Alexander Anissimov, Ulster Hall, Belfast
Prokofiev - Two Pushkin Waltzes. Shostakovich - Cello Concerto No 1. Glinka - Overture and Ballet Music from Russlan and Ludmila. Rimsky-Korsakov - Suite from Tsar Saltan.
On a hotter than usual evening - which found the Ulster Orchestra in shirt-sleeves and the audience fanning themselves with their programmes - lighter than usual fare would seem appropriate.
However, the two suites of bits and pieces which made up the second half of this programme were a bit much when played one after the other, even though Anissimov has the rare gift of knowing how to characterise such miniatures lightly and effectively, bringing out the music's piquancy and charm.
The Ulster Orchestra attacked the familiar Russlan Overture with great energy but there was more novelty value in the grotesque March, whose quirky orchestration and intentionally inane repetitions foreshadows Satie's Musique d'ameublement by at least seventy years, and in the Oriental Dances which so obviously influenced Rimsky-Korsakov, albeit the Rimsky of The Golden Cockerel rather than the Rimsky of Tsar Saltan.
There was plenty of colourful but not too noisy orchestration in the suite from the latter work, delivered with some panache.
Shostakovich's Cello Concerto No 1 was the most substantial item.
The first movement, a classic example of the brittle, emotionally ambivalent jocularity which Shostakovich made so much his own, missed some of the music's bite, and the slow movement was somehow one-dimensional, but in the lengthy cadenza which makes up the third movement the Swedish cellist Torleif Thedéen gave the murky opening space, building up to an impassioned climax.
Elsewhere, there were two charming waltzes by Prokofiev from 1949, a homage to Glinka as well as to Pushkin.
