Reviews today include the Trio Fontenay at the RDS in Dublin, Mick O'Brien and Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh at Airfield House in Dublin and Alexei Nabioulin with the RTÉ Philharmonic Choir and RTÉ NSO at the National Concert Hall
Trio Fontenay
RDS, Dublin
Mozart - Trio in G K496
Beethoven - Trio in D Op 70 No 1 (Ghost)
Brahms - Trio in B Op 8
For over a century the Royal Dublin Society was the major forum for chamber music and solo recitals in Dublin.
In recent decades the society's pre-eminence was undermined by its own changing fortunes as well as changes in the wider world, not least the opening of the National Concert Hall in 1981.
The final flicker of the candle seemed to have taken place three years ago, when a projected Beethoven piano sonata series by Hugh Tinney was abandoned in mid stride. But the society has rallied since, although it has to be said that the two recitals which have taken place annually in November since 2003 are but the palest reflection of a series that not so long ago ran to two recitals a week from October to March.
Other commitments conspired to keep me away from the new-style RDS recitals until last weekend. It was gratifying to see such a full house and feel such a warm buzz welcoming the Trio Fontenay from Germany, although if the RDS is once again to become serious about classical concerts it will have to address another buzz, the persistent one from the lighting in its concert hall, which has also been causing problems in the early rounds of the AXA Dublin International Piano Competition, which are held at the RDS every three years.
The highly-regarded Trio Fontenay is an ensemble with a style that seems to have become more assertive and forceful over the years. Compare the group's Mozart on disc (recorded 15 years ago, albeit with a different cellist) and their delivery in concert on Saturday and the results might readily seem to be the work of a different group.
Pianist Wolf Harden was error-prone and lumpy-sounding in the Mozart, but once into the Beethoven quickly settled into a zone where he tended to treat the music as a kind of mini piano concerto.
The two string players, Michael Mücke (violin) and Jens Peter Maintz (cello), were more restrained in delivery and co-operative in manner.
But it was the often disjunct over-projection of the piano which dominated the music-making.
There's not much music in the piano trio repertoire which can satisfactorily survive such an onslaught of anti-lyrical pianism, and none of it was to be found in Saturday's programme.
Mick O'Brien and Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh
Airfield House, Dundrum, Dublin
The drawing room grandeur of Airfield House has a habit of making its habitues feel right at home. Occasionally though, it serves not so much to cosset, but to overwhelm its inhabitants with its undeniable sense of occasion, and the unforgiving proximity of player and punter.
Mick O'Brien and Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh are long-time pipes and fiddle playmates.
However, on Friday night all familiarity was rendered redundant as the pair struggled for air amid the heightened expectation of an audience rapt before a single note was played.
Billed by Airfield's wonderfully-christened programming maestro, Sancho Gallilei, as a duo accustomed to nothing short of nuclear fusion, they barely managed to spark off one another as they struggled to meld fiddle and pipes beneath the normally-buoyant jig set, Kitty Lie Over.
Boundaries were breached temporarily during the pair of slides, The Star Above The Garter and The Lisheen Slide, as they surmounted the cripplingly reverential air that beset the stage, but whatever pace was set, was quickly marred by Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh's introduction of his Norwegian Hardanger fiddle. Ó Raghallaigh sang the instrument's praises, noting both its acoustic and physical challenges, but it was simply a stretch too far for an audience hell-bent on loving every minute of a set that had yet to take flight.
Sliabh Luachra came to the rescue in the form of Teampall an Ghleanntáin and The Humours of Derrykissane, with fiddle and pipes engaging in big, unapologetic tune transitions, and finally rising to the gallop we'd been promised from the outset. But it was a hiccupping set to the end, as both players struggled to share the same airspace.
They reached a certain nexus when whistles intersected effortlessly on the pair of jigs, Down The Back Lane and Kitty Come Down From Limerick, but the languid magic that they created on their CD, Kitty Lie Over, was nowhere to be heard.
Nabioulin, RTÉ Philharmonic Choir, RTÉ NSO/Brophy
NCH, Dublin
Tchaikovsky - Marche slave.
Rachmaninov - Piano Concerto No 1.
Glinka - Life for the Tsar Overture.
Shostakovich - Symphony No 3 (The First of May).
The 23-year-old Shostakovich's Third Symphony, subtitled The First of May, was very much in the spirit of its time.
It was an experimental piece. The composer told his friend and fellow-composer Vissarion Shebalin that he wanted to write a work in which "not a single theme was repeated". And in the late 1920s - the symphony was written in 1929 and premiered in January 1930 - combining experimentalism in the arts with a celebration of Soviet idealism was encouraged rather than frowned upon.
The composer wrote at the time "I tried to convey only the general mood of the International Workers' Day Festival. I wished to portray peaceful construction in the USSR. I would point out that the element of struggle, energy and ceaseless work runs through the whole symphony like a red thread." The music is rather like an extended shaggy dog story, wandering off the point for episodes where the mood is often hyper, the colouring garish, the level of dissonance high. It's on the lines of one damned thing after another, but as if emanating from the imagination of someone suffering from attention deficit disorder.
David Brophy drove the piece with a steady hand on Friday and, rather than taming the music, the effect was to highlight the unorthodox instability of Shostakovich's strange vision. The RTÉ Philharmonic Choir delivered the paean of the choral finale with an open-throated enthusiasm as if they relished every word of Semyon Kirsanov's cliched text.
Brophy's level-headed approach did not yield such rich dividends in either Tchaikovsky's Marche slave (where, at his slow tempo, his over-emphasis on secondary material became tedious), or in the overture to Glinka's opera, A Life for the Tsar, which sounded rather prosaic. The conducting seemed a little too formal for the romantic ardour of Rachmaninov's First Piano Concerto, and this may have clipped the wings of soloist Alexei Nabioulin.
