Today critics from The Irish Timesreview the West Cork Chamber Music Festival in Bantry House, Co Cork, Duran Duran at the Marquee also in Cork, John Feeley playing guitar at St Ann's Church, Dawson Street in Dublin and The Letter at the Pavilion Theatre in Dún Laoghaire

West Cork Chamber Music Festival
Bantry House, Co Cork

John Kinsella's new Prelude and Toccata, the first of this year's commissions at the West Cork Chamber Music Festival, was premiered by the RTÉ Vanbrugh Quartet on Sunday. Kinsella and the Vanbrughs go back a long way. He was the RTÉ's head of music when the station signed up the quartet more than 20 years ago, and they have long been champions of his work. And he goes back even further with the string quartet, both as a non-professional chamber musician, and as a composer.

The new work is full of strangeness. The very title is odd. A toccata is much more a keyboard than a quartet thing. And the actual opening sets the four instruments moving in unison for a length of time that turns what's normally a momentary gesture into an extended and fascinating feature.

I found myself responding to the music as if being exposed to the unassailable, topsy-turvy logic of a dream. Gestures that you would expect to sound straightforward - and much of the material itself has an everyday plainness about it - end up seeming slightly exotic, because of unexpected juxtapositions which leave them feeling unanchored. The various references to Wagner's Tristan und Isolde provide no more of a jolt than some of the music's other unusual excursions. The Vanbrughs played the piece with a slightly rough-edged enthusiasm.

The day had opened with a cello and piano recital by Peter Bruns and Annegret Kuttner that seemed designed to show an unusual breadth of stylistic response. There was carefully perfumed, tuneful folksiness in Charles Koechlin's Chansons Bretonnes, Op 115, sharp-edges and free lyricism in Beethoven's Sonata in A, premonitions of the future in Janácek's Pohádka (Fairy Tale), and the keening, melodic fall of Ernest Bloch's From Jewish Life. Bruns treated his listeners to some ravishing sounds, and Kuttner's often light-fingered playing was impressive for its airy clarity.

Airy clarity was not on the agenda for pianist Elisabeth Leonskaja's pairing of Schumann's Papillons and Schubert's Sonata in G, D894, the one flighty and intense in its brief fantasies, the other full of a kind of tragic clamour. Leonskaja took a little time to warm up, and lost her concentration a couple of times towards the end. But the musical message was always engaging, even when provocatively presented.

Russian mezzo Ludmila Shkirtil was one of the hits of last year's festival. But Grieg's song-cycle Haugtussa seemed not to be quite her kind of piece, too simple in manner, too resistant to point-making, requiring a kind of artlessness that didn't seem to be her gift. Her pianist Yuri Serov also gave the impression of handling the idiom with a foreign accent.

The great performance of the day came at the end. Schubert's Death and the Maiden Quartet is a work that's so inviting of excess from performers that it's easy to do it to death. The Cuarteto Casals played it as if every tiniest detail had been opened to reconsideration, to be weighed and balanced and then re-aligned into a performance where darkness of expression - and there was plenty of that - could be expressed with unusual lightness and transparency of sound. This was playing of miraculous freshness and potency.

The festival continues until Sun

Michael Dervan

Duran Duran
Marquee, Cork

The pre-show DJ set the scene, with Tainted Love and Don't You Want Me reminding everyone of the context from which Duran Duran emerged. When they first hit the scene in 1981, the five-piece had a monopoly on cool, quickly earning a name for their frenetic and stylish live performances. It's worth remembering they also walked the walk, picking up two Grammys and selling over 85 million records. Their reformation created something of a stir among balding music hacks and Duran die-hards, but to date their recordings have failed to match the hype. Thankfully, though, as a live act, they've lost none of their verve.

Opening with Planet Earth, and with lead singer Simon Le Bon looking like he just arrived from an X Factor audition, the 1980s superstars can still work a room, and remain as energetic and animated as their long shorn mullets. Le Bon struts about the stage like a youthful gazelle, with the band providing a tight, no-nonsense backline to counteract the strutting. Although the majority of Le Bon's audience may have traded teenage crushes for tracker mortgages, he's not beyond demanding, and received, healthy doses of hero-worshipping. In truth, despite their better judgments, many just couldn't help themselves. From 1985's A View to a Kill (their last number one) to Save A Prayer, Ordinary World and Girls on Film, the music lends itself to a certain amount of carefree adulation. A pity then, like so many reunited outfits, the newer material doesn't match the back catalogue.

Night Runner, their upcoming single recorded in New York with Justin Timberlake, got its European debut and sounded like a cross between George Michael and Peter André, and not in a good way. More mild boys than wild boys, then. Still, throw in Union of the Snake and a final rousing rendition of Rio, and the capacity audience returned to their family saloons content, having reclaimed a sizeable fragment of their teenage years. And who could deny them that?

Brian O'Connell

John Feeley, guitar
St Ann's Church, Dawson Street
Bach/Feeley - Cello Suite No 2. Jane O'Leary - Four Pieces. Bach/Feeley - Chaconne. Old Irish Airs. Seoirse Bodley - Islands. Giuliani - Rossiniana No 1

John Feeley is Ireland's leading exponent of the classical guitar. His solo recital, part of the current Walton's Guitar Festival of Ireland, included prudent balances of original music and arrangements, of old and new.

Feeley is well-equipped to respond to one of the standard challenges for all guitarists, namely, that so many great composers wrote so little for the instrument. He therefore makes his own arrangements. It can be argued that changing the medium must invariably change the music, and this was true for Feeley's Bach. In the Suite No 2 for solo cello, for example, in which Bach often ingeniously creates an impression of the continuous presence of two or three voices, the longer-lasting resonance of the plucked guitar string extends the possibilities for sustaining sound. To this add Feeley's discreet use of chords and of the guitar's easier facility in doing several things at once, and you no longer have quite the same miracle of single-voice composition that Bach originally contrived.

That said, it remains beautiful music, played beautifully by Feeley with his trademark inward concentration. The slow Chaconne - extracted from the Partita No 2 in D minor - was on this occasion even more satisfying, its gradual and intense build-up setting it apart from everything else in the programme.

As for new, original music for guitar, the programme included Jane O'Leary's 1993 Four Pieces and, receiving its premiere in the presence of the composer, Seoirse Bodley's Islands. Despite the title, O'Leary's eight-minute piece comes across as being of one, continuous ethos: wide-ranging and free, halting in manner, featuring spells of contemplation, interspersed with bursts of energy. Bodley introduced Islands as being partially influenced by his recent interest in the philosopher Karl Popper. Whatever exactly this might mean, it was possible to latch onto the composer's new-found interest in "experimenting with the ordinary", even though this half-suggested - most uncharacteristically for Bodley - some kind of Philip Glass-style banality.

The outcome, however, was neither dull nor simplistic, but featured a noteworthy clarity in all the music's shifting and combining and juxtaposing, the result of which, in Feeley's committed performance, was something strangely human and persuasive.

Michael Dungan

The Letter
Pavilion Theatre, Dún Laoghaire

From his introductory mutterings in Italian, French and then a sort of Dublinese, the audience realises instantly that the normal rules of drama will not be followed by Italian actor and mime artist Paolo Nani.

Although billed as a show for all ages, we also quickly understand that some of the comic sketches will go over the heads of many children - and even some adults. Hallmarks of a cult show, no doubt, and considering that The Letter has been performed 700 times around the world in the last 15 years, its cult status is already assured.

Inspired by French novelist Raymond Queneau's Exercises in Style, The Letter features Nani going through the routine of writing a letter in a succession of different characterisations. Sometimes, his wordless mimes of a drunk or a vulgar person are reminiscent of Rowan Atkinson's Mr Bean, but other times, their inventiveness are so bizarrely funny that they must certainly belong to Nani himself.

The audience warms to his style immediately, and throughout the 60-minute show, Nani responds well to the giggles and belly laughs. In fact, he is at his hilarious best when he engages directly with the audience; stopping the show while someone goes to the toilet and then playing a sort of catch-and-toss game with people in the front row.

Ultimately, it is the sheer inventiveness of the performance that is most striking and the realisation that good comedy is a universal language. So, if you're a fan of the genre, this show is a must, but leave all children under seven at home.

Tours to Belfast, Limerick and Wexford

Sylvia Thompson