A selection of reviews by Irish Timescritics

Malachy Robinson, double bass

Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin

Berio– Psy. Miloslav Raisigl– Suite No. 1 for Solo Double Bass. Hans Werner Henze Henze arr. Drew– Serenade. I an Wilson– Schattentiefe.

That rare event, a recital for unaccompanied double bass, marked the end of the current season of free concerts in the Hugh Lane Gallery’s Sundays at Noon series.

The performer was Malachy Robinson (below), principal double bass with the Irish Chamber Orchestra and familiar as a player with the Crash Ensemble, the Irish Baroque Orchestra, and in his own period-instruments ensemble, the Trio Quattro.

Here he was all alone, striving to sell his super-size instrument – normally consigned to a bedrock role in orchestral harmony, occasionally to the elephant in Saint-Saëns' Carnaval– as an autonomous conveyor of a fuller expressive spectrum.

His first two pieces were less suited to his purpose. The two minutes of mild agitation constituting Berio's Psy come from 1989 when Italy's leading composer of the 20th century was long past the adventure of his series of solo-instrument Sequenzas(which did not include the double bass).

And the flip-side of bass-player/composer Miloslav Raisigl’s expertise with the instrument in his otherwise charming, and Slavic-coloured Suite No. 1 is that it seemed to gravitate towards asserting, “And here’s something else the bass can do”.

In contrast, works by Hans Werner Henze and Belfast’s Ian Wilson sought simply to express things within the constraints of a single instrument. Henze’s 1949 Serenade for cello – persuasively transcribed by Lucas Drew, an American double bass teacher – uses nine miniature movements, some less than 20 seconds long, to explore a wide range of styles and moods, beautifully written within the kind of liberated tone-row technique that earned Henze the disdain of his purist avant-garde contemporaries.

Strictly speaking, Ian Wilson's 2004 Schattentiefe("Deep Shadow", in a shortened revision from 2008) is not unaccompanied since, in keeping with the central idea of Wilson's "Shadow" pieces, the work's second half features the soloist playing alongside a recording of his performance of the first. How well this worked, the instrument's wide range exploited and stretched so that the elephant's voice complemented rarer, more delicate utterances using high registers and halo-edged harmonics, all expressively achieved – as throughout this recital – by Robinson, the work's dedicatee. MICHAEL DUNGAN

Patrick Devine (organ)

St Michael’s, Dún Laoghaire

Buxtehude– Ciacona in E minor BuxWV160. Bach– Chorale Partita on O Gott, du frommer Gott BWV767. Mahler/Mansfield– Adagietto. Eben– Sunday Music (exc).

Patrick Devine chose a high-risk programme for his organ recital at St Michael's, Dún Laoghaire. It looks as if he likes regularity, and decided to give his listeners plenty of it – the recurring periods of a Buxtehude chaconne, the constant background in a set of variations by Bach, and the pattern of twitching rhythms which underlie much of the closing Moto ostinatofrom Petr Eben's Sunday Music.

But his most unusual inclusion was an arrangement by Purcell J Mansfield (1889-1968) of the Adagietto movement from Mahler’s Fifth Symphony. How, one wondered, might anyone use the organ to create the haunting colours of strings and harp, or simulate the so simple and yet so sophisticated string textures? Mansfield had the most straightforward of solutions. He tried to ignore the problems, simply omitting the harp’s evocative contribution, and leaving the music as a strange sequence of often motionless, extraordinarily dead-sounding chords.

To be fair, the performance by Patrick Devine probably didn't help. Devine, a lecturer in music at NUI Maynooth, is the organist of St Mary's Parish Church in Maynooth, and was a regular and much-praised recitalist in the 1970s and 1980s. His playing here, however, was in a dogged and dutiful style, safe in choice of tempos, and lacking in energy and tension. And that meant that, unfortunately, his adventurous choice of programme went rather against him. MICHAEL DERVAN