Mary Leland finds echoes burlesque on the stage in Cork and Michael Dervan samples the last in the current National Concert Hall's Composers' Choice series.
Santa Ponza or Bust
Everyman Palace, Cork
Two seasoned and expert performers in a multiplicity of roles offer a burlesque slice of life in Santa Ponza or Bust. A gullible Cork man is offered the holiday of a lifetime if he delivers a mysterious package for a mysterious stranger; he accepts with predictable consequences. Anticipation, however, seems to be part of audience approval. Robust colloquialisms and character sketches - or skits - are allied to dependable, if over-worked, double-meanings with every joke worked to extinction; a four-letter word brings down the house and a mention of Eddie Hobbs obliges the theatre again by raising the roof.
Set at a raucous pitch and played without a glimmer of the subtlety of which both actors are capable, this is a show whose production standards are so casual as to be almost non-existent. Experience and expertise should be correctives as well as permissions; if Frank Twomey and Paki O'Callaghan are good enough to scrape these sketches together into a comedy routine enjoyed by most of the audience, they should be good enough to eliminate its glaring weaknesses. There is no programme and no attribution for set or script, understandably enough.
Until Sat
Mary Leland
Stephen Gardner
NCH John Field Room
Xenakis - Dikhthas. Martin Butler - Capistrano Song. Stephen Gardner - Mutable Sea.
Bill Evans - Peace Piece. Stephen Gardner - You Can Beat An Egg
The National Concert Hall's Composers' Choice series presents its chosen composers with a dilemma. They have to include works of their own as well as music by others. A repeat of soprano Elisabeth Schwarzkopf's Desert Island Discs ploy - all her choices were of her own singing - is not an option. Nor is it permitted to focus solely on other people's work, however inspirational.
For the final concert of the current series, Stephen Gardner offered two works of his own, placing them in the company of Xenakis's Dikhthas for violin and piano, Bill Evans's Peace Piece for solo piano, and Martin Butler's Capistrano Song for clarinet and tape.
Gardner admires Xenakis because "his close attention to logistic and geometrical formulae was always subservient to his creation of richly emotive music". It was a pity, then, that the performance by members of Lontano was so subdued, balancing and contouring the music's angles so that they seemed at times almost pretty.
His fondness for Evans's Peace Piece stems from its simplicity and the fact that it's got "some nice dirty notes in there". Lontano's pianist, Dominic Saunders, gave it a nice, clean performance.
Gardner's programme notes offered no signs of engagement with Butler's Capistrano Song for clarinet and tape, a moodily drifting piece, with a tape part that opens with what sounds like a re-imagined vibraphone with super-sustaining power, but later descends into tired cliches.
Gardner is a composer whose music often seems roughly finished, making up in blunt determination what it lacks in subtlety or concision. His Mutable Sea, written in 1999 during his residency with Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council, shows a softer, almost sentimental, and ultimately less persuasive facet of his musical make-up.
When I heard it at its premiere, the amplification used by the Crash Ensemble came across as an effort to force the piece into an alien mould. Lontano and conductor Odaline de la Martinez avoided all such exaggeration, but the music remained as gray as a view of Dublin Bay on a foggy day.
The specially commissioned You Can Beat An Egg is written for the same ensemble of violin, cello, double bass, flute, clarinet and two pianos. But the new piece has an edgy bite and a kind of clamorous busyness, and provided the liveliest spot in a lacklustre evening.
Michael Dervan
