Irish Times critics review RTÉ NSO at the National Concert Hall, Abigail's Party at the Everyman Palace and Biggs, Ó Cuinneagáin at the John Field Room in Dublin

RTÉ NSO/Pearce
NCH, Dublin

This RTÉ Horizons concert saluted composer Jerome de Bromhead, and occasioned the long overdue premiere of his Symphony No 2. There was considerable personal input too from conductor Colman Pearce, the symphony's dedicatee.

The concert began with works by two composers who, in the 1950s, sought artistic freedom abroad: the late Andrzej Panufnik (a Pole who settled in England) and Leonardo Balada (a Catalan who settled in the US, and who was present for this performance).

Though Balada is noted for utilising whatever raw musical material he can lay his hands on, his Catalan fantasia Celebració (1992) places a strict embargo on Iberian cliches. Yet it still distinctively evokes the Mediterranean good life: fresh, colourful and slickly contemporary.

This was in stark contrast to Katyn Epitaph (1967), Panufnik's bleak and moving threnody for the Polish prisoners massacred in the second World War.

A new symphony is a rare enough event these days, and de Bromhead's No 2 would very likely have been performed long before now had the composer not been involved in a road accident shortly after completing the score in 1994.

This impressive piece doesn't wear its considerable intellect on its sleeve. It falls into paragraphs, but they intermingle; it has motifs, but they develop with discreet unpredictableness. Decoration, much of it chirpily contributed by the woodwind, constantly lightens the latently serious tone.

A luminous sonority - resulting chiefly from careful spacing of the strings - unifies the three movements. The first is characterised by active discourse among the instrumental families, the second by a kind of brooding perplexity, and the third by a slow but inexorable rise in tension.

Perhaps the orchestration could grow overcrowded, the sweeping violin lines could be irksome to tune, and the frequent glint of tuned percussion could pall. Yet a knowing way with the harmony brings the prevalent dissonance to a curious state of enlightened calm. The music may often be noisy, but it's always quietly affirmative.
Andrew Johnstone

Abigail's Party
Everyman Palace, Cork

Class warfare in the drawing room is never a pretty sight, but playwright Mike Leigh rarely indulges in charm. The uneasiness associated with Abigail's Party, one of his best-known plays, is that the audience is complicit in his assault on the bourgeoisie - to which, by and large, the audience itself belongs.

The theme is a simple one: a small group of people bound by a spurious intimacy come together for an evening of drinks and "cheesy bits", with the emphasis on the drinks.

The hostess is a terrifyingly self-confident woman who puts the Beaujolais in the fridge, for whom dinner is a warmed-over pizza, and who is psychologically (even psychotically) incapable of taking no for an answer.

The plot is almost entirely conversational, although it is a conversation that reveals character and circumstances with a chilling, if comic, reality.

Leigh's skill in this, of course, is that he allows just enough good-nature to shine through to reduce the monstrosity of these all-too-credible people.

But Leigh isn't Edward Albee; there's no intention here to "get the guests", and without any such intense dramatic charge the play is carried on the assured performances of Alice Selwyn, Steve Dineen, Amy Starling, Jamie Matthewman and Anna Kirke.

Directed by Michael Cabot for the London Classic Theatre, with a crowded set from Geraldine Bunzl, Abigail's Party succeeds in what it was meant to do - to make us laugh, as well as sneer, at ourselves, especially as there seemed to be almost as much drinking in the auditorium as there was on stage.

Runs until Saturday and then on nationwide tour
Mary Leland

Biggs, Ó Cuinneagáin
John Field Room, NCH

The second in Conor Biggs's series "What Makes a Great Song?" was devoted to French music. Like last week's programme devoted to German song, this one lived up to its billing as "a voyage of discovery".

One of Biggs's most engaging aspects is his ability to make it seem as if he is still exploring the music and the information he wishes to present, thanks to his knack with the informal bon-mot, as when he described Saint-Saëns's 1852 song Le pas d'armes du Roi Jean as "a French song in German wine-skins", and when he was describing the distinctively French aspects of Fauré's style.

During his introductory chat about Au cimetière he started singing a portion of it; and then he seamlessly metamorphosed Fauré's mellifluous lines into a portion of plainchant, as a manuscript of that ancient music was projected onto a screen. Everyone learned something valuable, and in a way that was utterly memorable.

Biggs's formula for this voyage worked effortlessly. After a brief introduction to each composer and poet, the poems were read by Biggs's wife Myriam Sosson. To this task she brought a musicality of speech that made the poetry sound exactly as it must have been for the composer - the starting point for composition.

The partnership between Biggs and Pádhraic Ó Cuinneagáin had that inseparable, common identity that comes when musicians have worked together for many years. From the French-Teutonic Saint-Saëns, to the true Frenchness of his younger contemporary Duparc, and from the image-rich suggestiveness of Debussy to the brilliant artifice of Ravel, this was a voyage full of memorable musical vistas.
Martin Adams