Elizabeth Cooney and Bobby Chen at the National Concert Hall and Emmylou Harris at the Stadium

Emmylou Harris

the Stadium

IT TOOK a little time for both performer and audience to warm to each other at the Stadium on Friday night but once it happened Emmylou Harris, her accomplished band and her fans fashioned a cosy embrace that just got tighter as the night wore on.

Harris, the thinking person's country diva, celebrated her 61st birthday last April with the release of her 21st album, All I Intended To be. The acclaimed album also marked her return to working with Brian Ahern, the Canadian producer who was once her husband, and with whom she recorded some of her key early albums in the 1970s and 1980s.

Looking strikingly attractive with her silvery mane framing her high cheekbones, Harris dipped into these albums for some reassuring blasts from the past.

Yet her versions of classics like Sweet Dreams, Wheels and Return of the Grievous Angel, the latter two recalling her association with the fabled Gram Parsons, seemed strangely perfunctory with her voice piercing and cold and the band struggling for traction.

Perhaps the hot drinks she was sipping throughout the two-hour concert worked the trick because the show turned around after an emotion-filled version of Steve Earle's Goodbye followed by a wrenching Not Enough, one of her own songs from her new album. It was a pivotal moment greeted with gusto by her faithful followers, many of whom looked old enough to have been following her career since she first played the Carlton Cinema with the legendary Hot Band over 30 years ago.

And while her band of Brian Owings - drums; Chris Donahue - bass; Phil Madeira - keyboards and accordion; Colin Linden - guitar; and Rickie Simpkins - mandolin, fiddle, banjo, might not be the equal of that combo, they were nonetheless very good indeed, their harmonies balancing and softening the pure tone of her voice and their individual playing colouring the songs in all the right places. Harris is a remarkable artist who has consistently stretched herself beyond her Nashville safety zone and this was reflected in the diversity of songs presented on the night, such as collaborations with Kate and Anna McGarrigle like Goin Back to Harlan or How She Could Sing the Wildwood Flower. Her ability to read a song, to punctuate it with emotion, has increased with the years as has her skill at measuring the ebb and flow of her distinctive voice. Her strength as a great artist is further enhanced by her willingness to share the stage, as when she called out excellent support act Kimmie Rhodes for a memorable duet. Generous, talented and good looking - as she said herself, Emmylou Harris has been blessed. And the Stadium audience stood in acclamation to agree.

JOE BREEN

Cooney, Chen

NCH, John Field Room, Dublin

Messiaen — Fantaisie. Greg Caffrey — Vigour, Rigour, Jigger. Benjamin Dwyer — Movimientos I-IV.

Music21 (formerly known as Mostly Modern) is running a series of concerts this month, the first two celebrating the centenary of the birth of Olivier Messiaen.

Friday's Messiaen offering, of a performance of the early Fantaisie for violin and piano, was not in fact the Irish premiere that violinist Elizabeth Cooney expressly made a claim for in her spoken introduction. Darragh Morgan beat her to it on two separate occasions, in Belfast (last year) and Waterford (earlier this year). The work, premiered by the composer and his first wife Claire Delbos in 1935, was long believed lost. But it was found in Messiaen's papers by his widow, Yvonne Loriod, and it has since been both issued in print and released on CD.

Although Messiaen wrote one of the great works of 20th-century chamber music in his Quartet for the End of Time, he didn't actually leave much for two players or small ensembles. The Fantaisie may be early, but it is already so impregnated with familiar Messiaenic flavours, that it's easy to imagine it becoming a favourite with violinists. Cooney and her partner at the piano, Bobby Chen, took an unusual approach to the piece, playing it - not convincingly to my ears - as if it were a 19th-century virtuoso showpiece.

Greg Caffrey's Vigour, Rigour, Jigger for solo violin was commissioned by Cooney and was being heard for the first time on Friday. It follows a familiar three-movement pattern of activity sandwiching calm, but with the outer movements having moments of zaniness, as if Caffrey were trying to mesh elements of rock music into an unexpected context. Benjamin Dwyer's Movimientos I-IV for violin and piano is constructed like a slow series of points or pitches where the interest lies in the elaboration of the decorations around and connections between the points. The technique is exposed at its boldest and barest in the third movement Passacaille.

MICHAEL DERVAN