A Clockwork Orange, The Potthouse, Cathedral Quarter Festival, Belfast: From the picturesque cobbled streets and courtyards of Belfast's Cathedral Quarter - where the annual arts festival is offering up new sights and sounds every day - Rawlife Theatre Company invites the unsuspecting to step into Anthony Burgess's unforgiving dystopian world, where everything is as bad as it can be.
Writer/director Martin McSharry has made inventive use of the glass and steel post-modern environment of this uber-trendy bar, built on the 17th-century site of the city's first pottery. He has, however, given himself a tricky task in assembling a cast of 15, capable of portraying the nihilistic menace and violence of gang leader Alex and his doped-up acolytes, as well the local community which lives in terror of them. The difficulties are further exacerbated by the uncomfortable fusion of the Belfast vernacular with the whining estuary English rhythms of the gang's own impenetrable argot.
But in Martin McCann as his narrator and protagonist, he has chosen one of the most engaging and gifted young actors to have emerged from the North in a long time. With his soft voice, face and manner, McCann stamps his own deceptively sweet presence onto the character of the appalling Alex, who loves nothing more than a shot of Beethoven and Shakespeare before committing an act of sickening depravity. Daire Cunningham is a cruelly glinting Georgie, Lyn Harris a disarmingly attractive psychiatrist and the always excellent Jo Donnelly a potentially sadistic chief shrink. The packed audience in this terrific venue voted with its feet to a one-off experience by an enterprising young company. - Jane Coyle
****
Sonorities Festival of Contemporary Music, Queen's University Belfast: Traditional acoustic music derives, however distantly, from song and dance; electro-acoustic music presents electronically generated sound and natural sound as aesthetic objects. If acoustic music involves the feelings, electro-acoustic music inclines us to contemplation, especially when one is sitting in a darkened studio, with little in the way of visible performance apart from the silhouetted figure of the sound diffuser bent over his instrument panel. In today's overstimulated world, the results can be so refreshing, cleansing the ears and enabling us to hear the everyday world differently.
Paris-born veteran Luc Ferrari, a pioneer of musique concrete in the 1950s, began his deceptively simple but somehow fascinating "Presque rien" series, based on recordings of live sounds, in 1970. The third of the series, Presque rien avec filles (1989), gives a snapshot of picnicking girls in Italy and France, while Presque rien No 4 (1990-1998) combines natural sound recorded by Ferrari in the Italian village of Vintimille with unrelated material, some of it purely "musical". In the more heterogeneous Saliceburry cocktail the naturally timeless quality found in so much electro-acoustic music, however active it may be on the surface, is challenged by vaguely Latin-American cocktail-shaker rhythms.
There was no lack of human involvement in Frances Lynch's She - Transformations. The venue changed to the Harty Room for this bravura solo performance (with discreet electronic reinforcement by Alan Burgess), parading various feminine roles from erotic fantasy to mundane domestic reality with the help of costume changes, props (chocolate cake) and the help of some young schoolgirls. Extracts from Kurtag's Sudelbuchern Georg Christoph Lichtenbergs and Judith Weir's Blond Eckbert mingled with music theatre and parody in a funny and touching tour-de-force.
The importance of the human element also came to the fore in UNFAIR, a real-time audio and video project featuring Austrian performance artist Dietmar Bruckmayr. This hefty, near-naked figure, shaven-headed and covered in tattoos, groaned, sang, and "excited" the microphone in a compelling display of extreme vocalism, offset by a flickering abstract video realisation and electronic diffusion provided by Michaela Schwentner and Michael Strohmann.
Twenty-four world premieres of pieces by 24 composers aged 14-18 were featured in the final day's concert given in SARC by the Ireland String Quartet (leader Nigel Ireland, a violinist in the Ulster Orchestra), following a month-long Sound Inventors project. The pieces were short, interesting, and varied, and although they naturally reflected, in various ways, the music that the composers were used to hearing, they all did more than that. Some of the freshest music heard in the series appeared in this concert, and some of the most sincere and direct. They were also remarkably well written for the medium. Lead composer Deirdre Gribbin and her assistant composers Katarzyna Glowicka and Iain McCurdy have worked wonders in getting the participants to realise their potential.
Before this concert, some of us might have been put to it even to name 24 living Northern Irish composers. But they all had something to say. What might they go on to do, given encouragement? - Dermot Gault
****
No Messin' With the Monkeys, The Ark, Dublin: Shows at The Ark can hardly fail, given the welcoming environment the venue provides for children. By the time the cast of monkeys ushered the audience into the theatre, most of the children had already completed monkey drawings and made a friend or two with whom to watch the show. Later on, on their way out, they were also given a beautifully produced programme/booklet with games and activities.
The show, then, was only part of the experience at the opening night of No Messin' With the Monkeys, scripted by Roddy Doyle. It is a visually arresting production, imaginatively designed by Chisato Yoshimi, with the striking backdrops painted by children under her supervision.
The action begins in Dublin Zoo, where the cast of three (Niamh Lawlor, Richie McEntee and Karl Quinn) and assorted puppets play a family of seven monkeys. To their bemused but kindly keeper, they are just banana-eating chattering chimps; but as soon as his back is turned, they resume their normal lives, arguing, going to work at chocolate and crisp factories, sharing snack-boxes, going to the pictures and causing mayhem on the streets of Dublin. The bars of their cage are stretched apart whenever required by "Uncle Jimmy's fat arse, the only thing in Dublin bigger than the Spire", and the family's adventures roll along happily until their keeper decides that the younger monkeys should be sent back to their natural environment in Africa ("a vast continent without a single chipper").
The story is simple but requires versatility and physicality from the actors, who seemed a little uncertain early on with all the demands made on them. The comedy relies more on slapstick and a couple of "rude" words than on sharp dialogue (surprisingly for a Roddy Doyle script), and the action will get faster and more polished with a few performances. A good time is guaranteed, though maybe for children at the younger end of the six- to 11-year-old age group the production is aimed at. By the end of this tour, this hard-working cast are going to be skinny monkeys.
Runs at The Ark until Sat, Jun 18th, then tours to Firkin Crane, Shandon, Cork (Jun 20th-25th), Dunamaise Arts Centre, Portlaoise, and Mermaid Arts Centre, Bray, Co Wicklow. Details: 01-6707788; www.ark.ie - Giles Newington
****
ICO/Galway, NCH, Dublin
Mozart - Symphony No 29 in A
Cimarosa - Concerto in G for two flutes
Elgar - Serenade for strings
Mozart - Flute Concerto in G K314
James Galway opened his concert with the Irish Chamber Orchestra at the National Concert Hall on Thursday with a double tribute to the orchestra's founding conductor, Andrá Prieur, who died last month.
He called on the Arts Council to honour the conductor's legacy by giving the orchestra the funds to place its players on full-time rather than part-time contracts. And, since Prieur was himself a flautist, he offered a memorial performance of Debussy's Syrinx, the best-known and most-loved of pieces for solo flute.
Galway hasan enviable and unique reputation. He's the only flautist to have established himself internationally as a household name. And at 65 he still delivers the goods with a technique and style that set him apart from all of his colleagues.
The sensitive listener's ear may now question his intonation from time to time, but the sweetness and power of his tone throughout the range, his astonishing control of dynamics, and the sheer strength and consistency of his musical personality continue to impress.
His playing is very much that of a virtuoso holding on to his audience's attention. His reluctance to observe rests in Mozart, for instance, gives the flute writing a seamlessness of line which is not to the music's advantage. Yet the athleticism of the playing and the musical guile that's shown in moments of minute detailing are captivating.
He was joined by his wife Jeanne for the light warbles and chases of Cimarosa's Concerto in G for two flutes. And the two players also joined forces for a fanciful arrangement of Mozart's Rondo alla turca, elaborately re-written with decorations in wedding-cake style.
In Mozart's Symphony No 29 and Elgar's Serenade for strings, Galway the conductor was altogether less obtrusive in interpretative manner than he was as a flautist. His manner was easy, the music-making unforced, a bit too careful, perhaps, in parts of the Elgar, but always fluid and clear in the symphony.
The evening ended with a selection of encores introduced and delivered with the inimitable grace and dash of a born entertainer. - Michael Dervan
****
The Tears, Marquee, Cathedral Quarter Arts Festival: When former Suede men Brett Anderson and Bernard Butler announced they were working together again following their mid-1990s schism, a generation swooned.
The last time the pair's talents and egos clashed, they created some of the key songs of Britpop, layered with Bowie-obsessed androgyny and great guitar hooks.
Their reunion caused many fans to think more of the same was on the way. Talk about false dawns. The main act of the Cathedral Quarter Arts Festival, still Belfast's liveliest and best, The Tears steadfastly refused to play any Suede's hits. Such a bold approach would be admirable if the new material was even a patch on the old. It's not. Though every track started with Butler wrestling his guitar through his trademark muscular riffs, teasing the crowd into thinking a classic moment from the back catalogue was approaching, the songs quickly died. Aside from the new single Refugees, a rare captivating track with defiant lyrics and a generous swoon, there was nothing of merit.
Frequently, Anderson tried to show he was still as lithe and dangerous as ever. Dressed in the same simple black garb he favoured in 1995, he pogoed, he climbed the speakers and he frowned earnestly into the middle-distance. But you really have to question a man who has kept the same haircut for more than a decade. He's clinging onto something that just isn't there anymore.
At one point he admonished those in the crowd who had not voted in the general election. Rather than sounding like the edgy, rock and roll outsider he once was, he turned into an irritating headmistress.
Suede worked because the tension between Anderson and Butler crackled. At any moment, you always sensed, the delicate détente between the pair would explode.
This has all gone now, replaced with a genial and open warmth. That's just dandy for them, but it meant there were no sparks, no sense of drama, nothing to raise the lumpen, boring show above the ordinary.
Proving that some things are best left to memory, The Tears are not worth crying for. - Paul McNamee
