La Bottine Souriante at the NCH, Dublin
It's been a while since the National Concert Hall witnessed such thigh-slapping, torso-twisting highs. Inspired and creative programming for this year's Beo Celtic Music Festival proved its worth when French Canadian conglomerate La Bottine Souriante (The Smiling Boot) whupped it up with a passion and left the rest of us in the stalls vainly attempting to keep up, with the odd foot tap or pelvic tilt.
The night was a reminder that above all else, music can be joyful. Amid the magnificent dissonance of fiddles, saxophones, trumpets, harmonicas, electric guitars and a whole heap of other instruments, this Québécois 10-piece somehow managed to sidle their way into our affections, using nothing more than a vibrant repertoire, a seemingly jointless dancer and an infectious joie de vivre.
Marriage reels (Mon père mariez-moi donc/Le reel des nouveaux mariées), tales of dastardly demonic excursions from hell (Le démon sort de l'enfer), and assorted gallops and quadrilles are the currency they trade in, and by the end of the evening we were attempting to trade in it ourselves, as though born to its pleasures from the cradle.
André Brunet's fiddle wove athletically between the vibrant accordion and harmonica (not to mention soft shoe shuffles) of Pierre-Luc Dupuis; Éric Beaudry commandeered foot-tapping, guitar and mandolin, fuelled in equal parts by grace and danger, and Pierre Belisle fired salvos from keyboards and piano accordion with the mischievousness of a schoolboy intent on bursting the bubble of any member tempted to take it all too seriously.
And so Acadian, Basque, jazz and salsa shimmied alongside traditional French folk, their colours not so much colliding as coalescing so that there were no edges or seams showing.
But La Bottine Souriante's pièce de résistance came not in their jagged multi-instrumentalism - or even in their insistence that the music breathe free, unfettered by any lyrical straightjacket - but instead in the spirit-shocking presence of percussive step-dancer, Sandy Silva.
Although a recent addition to their ranks, it was she who merged the ensemble effortlessly, with a range of elastine set pieces that dizzied the audience. Now this was a lesson in succumbing to the music. At times she bore an odd resemblance to sean nós step dancers from Tory Island, Co Donegal, but mostly she just reminded us that this music is made for dancing. And how we tried to keep up.
Siobhán Long
The ESB Beo Celtic Music Festival ends on Sunday, August 17th. www.nch.ie
Flynnie at the Everyman Palace, Cork
The genius of Father Christy O'Flynn, the subject of Flynnie, was that he could span the imaginative, social and spiritual spaces lying between the pigeon fancy and his own productions of Shakespeare's plays.
He was not a saint, yet he achieved beatification among the parishioners of the North Cathedral, Cork city, where he is still a legendary presence despite his dispatch, after 26 years, to the harbour town of Passage West, Co Cork, and his death in 1962. This condensed version of Michael McAuliffe's adaptation of Like a Tree Planted, a life of Father O'Flynn written by Robert O'Donoghue, is not an adequate introduction either to the man or the book. Under-rehearsed and awkwardly housed in the narrow foyer of the theatre, the piece cries out for expansion and stronger directorial focus.
However, it does at least offer an opportunity to enjoy a sturdy native wit, with Monica Murphy having a particularly nice version of the laconic and all the cast sharing an awareness of the exact pitch and passion of north-side repartee.
Mary Leland
Runs until August 30th
McChrystal, NYWO/Gourlay at the NCH, Dublin
Ovations - Martin Ellerby, Saxophone Concerto - Binge, Firebird Suite - Stravinsky/Fennell/Earles, Folk Dances - Shostakovich/Reynolds, Diaghilev Dances - Kenneth Hesketh, Sweet Dreams - Sean McWilliams, Dance Movements - Philip Sparke
Here, the National Youth Wind Orchestra of Great Britain ended its short Irish tour under the baton of James Gourlay. The 70-strong orchestra offered a programme that ran from arrangements of Stravinsky and Shostakovich, through the 1956 Saxophone Concerto by Ronald Binge to more recent pieces by Martin Ellerby, Kenneth Hesketh, Sean McWilliams and Philip Sparke.
Ronald Binge (1910-79), composer of Charmaine, Sailing By and Elizabethan Serenade, also worked as an arranger, and was the man who invented the famous effect of cascading strings for Mantovani's orchestra.
Sadly, his Saxophone Concerto, ably performed by Gerard McChrystal, has nothing of the catchiness of his most famous tunes. Like much similar light music - and there was a lot of it in this programme - it passed the time amiably but unmemorably.
The NYWO's playing under James Gourlay tended to vary in quality in sympathy with the music, sharpening in focus and expressive point for the arrangements of Stravinsky's Firebird Suite and the Folk Dances of Shostakovich, and elsewhere, with consistently strong solo work, sounding at its best where the orchestration was at its most colourful.
Gerard McChrystal returned for Sean McWilliams's Sweet Dreams, changing from alto to soprano saxophone for a piece which begins in anodyne, TV music style before affording the soloist an opportunity to let his hair down, firstly over a slow-moving background and then all on his own.
McChrystal's sky-rocketing efforts provoked the evening's loudest cheers and whistles, and Philip Sparke's Dance Movements, intentionally and shamelessly derivative, brought the concert to a rousing conclusion with its emulation of the Leonard Bernstein of West Side Story.
Michael Dervan
