MICHAEL DUNGANreviews Amarcord, NCC/Holten as part of the Cork International Choral Festival while CHRISTIE SEAVERsaw the Dublin Dance Festival: Risa Jaroslow, Crash Ensemble at the O'Reilly Theatre in Dublin

Amarcord, NCC/Holten
Cork International Choral Festival

THE CORK International Choral Festival is unique in Ireland in the intensity of its quest for top-level international choral ensembles for the concerts which punctuate five days of amateur competitions.

Among this year's guest choirs was the outstanding German ensemble Amarcord. Specialists in the medieval and Renaissance periods, these five young men exploited the responsive acoustic of Cork's Cathedral of St Mary and St Anne to sustain an atmosphere of spiritual communion via the conduit of music.

In certain respects they were flawless, for example in their shaping and consistency of colour of musical line, both in the meandering unison of plainsong and in the intertwining voices of Renaissance polyphony. They were also impeccable in balance and blend, the five voices like a five-stringed instrument, identical in all but range.

At an earlier concert, conductor Bo Holten and the National Chamber Choir combined an upcoming tour programme with two festival commissions.

The first of these was The Spring by Tarik O'Regan. In settings of ancient Irish texts and translations, recounting the travels of the warriors Oisín and Caílte, O'Regan sticks to an accessible style, switching between passages of hymn-like homophony, some with drones and others with ostinatos like the calls of country maids. He said this was to maintain the focus on narrative, something which nonetheless would have been hard to follow for the many audience members who arrived after the photocopied texts had run out. Such was its strong characterisation of playful ardour, you didn't actually need the text in order to "get" Rhona Clarke's three-minute setting of The Kiss by Ulick O'Connor.
MICHAEL DUNGAN

Dublin Dance Festival: Risa Jaroslow, Crash Ensemble
O'Reilly Theatre, Dublin

A solitary figure lay naked, face down on the floor, Botticelli-like in his sinewy strength. A woman joined him as he struggled to crawl, then stand and walk, beginning a journey reflecting the human condition. New York-based choreographer Risa Jaroslow investigates modern societal issues, often merging performers with non-dancers, and here she examined maleness and its potency, highlighting changes in the balance of power.

In Resist/Surrender, dancers Elise Knudson, Gabriel Forestieri, Luke Gutgsell and Paul Singh attracted and deflected each other through kicks, thrusts and off-balance walks and runs, supported in their plight by a cast of eight men recruited in Dublin.

Some of the strongest moments included the dancers throwing themselves upside down against the stage's back wall, as if testing their own limits.

The action maintained pace until more than halfway through the show, and the repetitive manoeuvres could have appeared as dance exercises strung together, except that Resist/Surrender's loose narrative gelled into a compelling ending, as if the previous back and forth represented a jockeying for position.
CHRISTIE SEAVER