Reviewed today are: Blur, Olympia, Dublin, Jean-Michel Veillon, Gerry O'Connor & Kevin Doherty, Áras Chronáin, Dublin, Andrew Stones, National Sculpture Factory, Cork, Colette McGahon, Philip O'Reilly & John O'Conor, Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin
Blur Olympia, Dublin
Kevin Courtney
When the guitarist Graham Coxon got his walking papers from Blur, we feared the end for Colchester's likely lads. Would Blur without Coxon be like a rowing team without its coxwain? The album Think Tank saw Damon Albarn, Alex James and Dave Rowntree rethink their approach and steer a course even further away from the safe stream of Britpop. Now the trio are at the Olympia for three festive nights, and the proof is in the Christmas pudding: Blur are still a blinding proposition.
They could have done a Verve and brought in a pedal-steel player to replace Coxon; instead, Blur have recruited former Verve guitarist Simon Tong, who establishes himself firmly with the opening chords of Beetlebum. As if to reassure the fans that they haven't yet gone all post-garde and avant-modern, Blur bounce into Girls And Boys, the perennial anthem for summer-holiday frolics. Albarn, still looking schoolboy-handsome, eyes up the crowd and decides this is one battle he definitely can win.
Good Song demands some quiet attention from the crowd and explains why Blur chose smaller, more intimate venues for their current tour. With the help of three backing singers, a percussionist and keyboard player, Albarn guides the sound through the many ages of Blur, from their baggy début single, She's So High, through the neopsychedelic tunes of Modern Life Is Rubbish and the Britpop-defining album Parklife, right up to his current electro- world-music preoccupation, which permeates the new songs Ambulance, Caravan, Brothers And Sisters and the utterly enchanting Out Of Time.
Blur have often seemed too sarky to show real emotion, but Tender shows Albarn's heart breaking out of its Camden shell. To The End is thrown into a different, less diffident light, and as the crowd sings along it seems certain that Blur still have some distance left to run.
It's only on Song 2 that you feel the loss of Coxon, but any pangs are buried under a landslide of "whoo-hoo!" Albarn is firmly at the helm now, and he leads the crowd through Trimm Trabb, This Is A Low, For Tomorrow and The Universal, leaving us with the feeling that, with Blur, anything really, really, really could happen.
Jean-Michel Veillon, Gerry O'Connor & Kevin Doherty, Áras Chronáin, Dublin
Siobhán Long
They don't come much more eclectic than this. The knapsackful of tunes of the Breton flute player Jean-Michel Veillon pepped up the combined step of a packed Áras Chronáin in Clondalkin on Sunday night with the ease of a musician who not only knows the tunes like the back of his hand but also knows his audience just as well. Kicking off with a pair of Breton tunes, one of Napoleonic origins, he slowly drew us into his web, then spun us every which way with tales and tunes borrowed from Scotland, Ireland and Nova Scotia, not to mention delectable Yiddish klezmer music.
As a member of the Breton group Kornog, Veillon has already served his apprenticeship in these parts, but his faultless grasp of the nuance that unites and divides Breton and Irish music was both instructive and intuitive.
This was the last of four gigs organised by students from Ballyfermot College of Further Education. Local man Gerry O'Connor regaled us with a multitude of tales - and there was a moment when we suspected we might never hear a tune from his beloved banjo. But paired with his regular compadre from 4 Men And A Dog, Kevin Doherty, on guitar, he eventually previewed tunes from his own forthcoming album, as well as coaxing us through a maze of others, borrowed from the playing of Tipperary box player Paddy O'Brien, The Byrd's Clarence White and Brosna's Tom Billy. O'Connor's own tunes would excite the most Ritalin-fuelled audience, their complexity and fluency reflecting a rake of influences from the Appalachians to the Comeragh mountains. And once he aired his fiddle for the magnificent slow air Song For P. J., there was simply no going back. This was a night crashing headlong for glory.
Doherty, ever the languid sidekick, snuck in a handful of his own songs, their lyrical intricacies matched by his increasingly labyrinthine playing style. He claims to distinguish himself from other songwriters by writing new songs about the same woman (as opposed to writing the same old songs about new women), but what mattered was that his rakish take on matters of love and life are unmatched. So whether it's Mary Anne or Mary J., Doherty somehow manages to meld humorous asides with a divine sense of the absurd in both his singing and his guitar work.
Flute player Paul McGrattan joined them for the final knees-up, along with Altan's Ciaran Tourish and the local student organisers. It was a session that wandered all over the map, its itinerary a timely reminder of all that's thriving in one of the city's most welcoming venues.
Andrew Stones, National Sculpture Factory, Cork
Mark Ewart
Accumulator, a site-specific live video event by Andrew Stones, was staged over three evenings, part of the Cork-wide Art Trail festival, which promotes public access to artists' working spaces, turning them into alternative exhibition venues.
In terms of its physical and conceptual structure, Accumulator was an impressive spectacle. The central component of the work was a huge projection showing a time-lapse video sequence recorded between the winter and summer solstices, using a CCTV camera mounted high above the sculpture factory's floor.
The camera focused on the central aisle of the factory, which was later lined up exactly in the projection, to mirror the space itself. As such, the aisle then became a conduit between the screen and the "observation room" raised above the factory floor. This proved a fantastic position from which to view the screen but was also an intriguing installation, housing the nerve centre of the artwork, comprising a perplexing bank of video, audio and computer equipment.
It was strangely exhilarating to stand inside the glass-fronted chamber, listening to the slow, steady breathing of the soundtrack while, outside, the growling, pulsating noises synchronised with increasing urgency to the images. All this was united by an eerie ultraviolet glow used as an interactive device later in the event, as the ubiquitous camera picked up live the fluorescent flyers carried by the viewers.
This multifaceted artwork was thoughtfully considered, with all of its elements cogently linked. Stones established an interface between the human experience, the patterns of nature and the computer technologies that monitor it all. Such facets as routine, social interaction, memory and reproduction have then become interchangeable, indistinguishable within one homogenous entity.
Colette McGahon, Philip O'Reilly & John O'Conor Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin
Douglas Sealy
The first part of the Italian Songbook, 23 miniatures written by Hugo Wolf in two rushes of inspiration in 1890 and 1891, was performed last Sunday with a jeweller's attention to detail. John O'Conor, at the piano, gave his part all the importance it demands without putting the singers under pressure, so each song was a genuine duet and not a tune with accompaniment. He gave the melodies in his part just the right weight to speak through the texture and blend with the voice.
Philip O'Reilly's bass voice was at its most tenderly expressive, not least in the first song, Auch Kleine Dinge (Even Small Things Can Delight Us), a phrase that could stand as a motto for the collection. Colette McGahon fully appreciated the sly humour of Mein Liebster Ist So Klein (My Sweetheart Is So Small), but at times she was tempted to overload the emphasis, adding the emotion to the words instead of allowing it to speak through them.
In Ihr Seid Die Allerschönste (You Are The Most Beautiful Of All), which is marked "inward and passionate", O'Conor conveyed the passion so forcefully that one would not have guessed the opening bars are marked p and pp, and O'Reilly was in matching voice, but overall the three performers kept faith with the composer.
