Critics from The Irish Times review the latest acts at the National Concert Hall and Airfield House in Dublin.
McDonough, RTÉ NSO/Christie NCH, Dublin: John Corigliano — Tournaments. Christopher Rouse — Flute Concerto. Tchaikovsky — Symphony No 4.
The American conductor Michael Christie, who made his debut with the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra on Friday, has an impressive CV for a man who turned 30 last year.
He is music director of the Phoenix Symphony and the Colorado Summer Festival, principal guest conductor of the Queensland Orchestra in Australia, and has made guest appearances with a long list of orchestras on both sides of the Atlantic.
His style on Friday identified him as a brash, outgoing musician. His approach, particularly in the Corigliano and Tchaikovsky, was excitable and edgy. His enthusiasm for winding up the volume was noteworthy and he often heightened the dominant orchestral colours to destructively dazzling saturation points.
Unfortunately, the unwelcome trade-offs between momentary impact and musical subtlety were compounded by a myriad of unexpected technical flaws in the orchestra’s delivery.
It was interesting, however, to have the first half of the programme given over to unfamiliar works from Christie’s home country. John Corigliano’s upbeat Tournaments of 1965 is a piece that you could describe as eclectic, derivative, or simply opportunistic. Its sometimes giddy brightness seemed too fierce and unrelenting in Christie’s hands.
Christopher Rouse's five-movement Flute Concerto, written for Carol Wincenc and premièred by her in 1993, has direct links with Ireland.
The outer movements are both titled Amhrán and the composer has described them as "simple melodic elaborations for the solo flute over the accompaniment of orchestral strings".
His intention was “in a general way to evoke the traditions of Celtic, especially Irish, folk music but to couch the musical utterance in what I hoped would seem a more spiritual, even metaphysical, manner through the use of extremely slow tempi, perhaps not unlike some of the recordings of the Irish singer Enya”.
He has certainly mastered the knack of conjuring up hazy background curtains of string tone to allow free rein to the soloist. On this occasion, Emer McDonough sustained and inflected the slow flute lines with the same apparently effortless ease she brought to the flightier dancing passages.
The music may not have been particularly memorable, but she performed it with great presence. This was her subscription series début with the NSO and the audience clearly took her to their hearts, calling her back to the platform again and again and again.
Michael Dervan
Crasdant and Téada Airfield House, Dublin:
After years of neglect round these parts, Welsh music has found itself centre stage, with two superb bands wending their way across the country in the
space of two weeks.
Toreth were more than capable curtain-raisers and now Crasdant have made our acquaintance, with an altogether different breed of Welsh music, none of it tethered to the Methodist Calvinist hymns which for so many years shackled Severn-side traditional music to ecclesiastical settings. Robin Huw Bowen’s triple harp is the pivot on which Crasdant turns.
This is not a folk instrument for the faint-hearted, its calculuslike string arrangements posing a challenge for the musician that surpasses most other
instruments.
Bowen’s mastery of the harp is impressive, and he stretches its lithe skin across a colourful selection of tunes, including his own Polka Eldra and Thomas Llewellyn’s The Miniature. Andy McLauchlin lends lithe flute and guitarist and Welsh clog dancer HuwWilliams brings both humour and a delicious rhythmic sensibility to the mix.
Crasdant were joined by a young Irish-American, Chicagoborn fiddler for this tour and his virtuoso playing was such that if he were to loiter for long, he’d surely be snapped up by our own traditional music circles.
Téada dovetailed seamlessly with Crasdant and yet inhabited a different space, where Oisín Mac Diarmada’s fiddle and Damien Stenson’s flute champion a feisty Sligo spirit, even on tunes borrowed from Clare concertina player, Mrs Crotty and piper Séamus Ennis.
The band’s inventive pairing of O’Carolan’s Planxty Crilly with aMicho Russell tune and a slide reflected a quintet unafraid of the history that shaped the music and yet respectful of its legacy at the same time. Paul Finn’s button accordion added just the right tincture of spirited vigour to the mix, while Seán McElwain’s guitar and bouzouki and Christian Rosenstock’s bodhrán wrapped the entire ensemble in a finely woven skein of rhythm.
With the carved hieroglyphics of Airfield’s grand drawing room providing the musicians with a veritable landscape on which to muse (and some of them couldn’t resist the temptation to do so), Crasdant’s and Téada’s spirits soared high.
Siobhán Long
