Davin O'Dwyerreviews Al Green and Joe Cocker at Malahide Castle while Michael Dunganreviews the Irish Youth Choir, New Jersey Youth Symphony Orchestra at the NCH in Dublin

Al Green and Joe Cocker
Malahide Castle

When Joe Cocker belts out Summer in the City in that charcoal-aged roar of his, it's hard not to gaze around at the muddy field and the grey skies and the spitting rain and wonder how different this would all be if, indeed, we were enjoying a summer in the city.

Instead, this was yet another big outdoor concert notable for the profusion of umbrellas and waterproof jackets.

Cocker's throaty vocal timbre has added distinctive grit to plenty of famous songs down the years and he gives most of them an airing here, all delivered with the trademark facial tics and a sprinkling of air piano. His version of With a Little Help from my Friends made his reputation when he performed it at Woodstock, but he spins it out here with an interminable rendition that's heavy on the organ and soaring backing vocals, but a little light on inspiration.

It's when the Rev Al Green takes to the stage that the event becomes inspired. Attired in a tuxedo and bearing roses for his adoring fans, the rock'n'roll hall- of-famer could win over the most sodden of audiences with his perma-grin and exhortations to the faithful to sing out and say "yeah". This preacher knows how to work the crowd, even if the conditions weren't quite to his liking. "It's cold out here," he says on a few occasions, while at others he playfully suggests to security that his dancing fans at the front should be allowed to dance rather than sit.

"They're not going to hurt me," he chuckles. After running through the hits, including Let's Get Married, How Can You Mend a Broken Heart and, of course, Let's Stay Together, there's no doubt that Al Green can inject soul into the wettest of Sundays.

Davin O'Dwyer

Irish Youth Choir, New Jersey Youth Symphony Orchestra/Spratt, Bahl
NCH, Dublin
Gershwin - An American in Paris. Mahler - Adagietto. Bernstein - On the Waterfront. Bruckner - Te Deum

It was a bit strange that this concert, billed as being in celebration of the Irish Youth Choir's 25th anniversary, featured so little of the Irish Youth Choir. Its part in the concert was confined to the short second half and a performance of Bruckner's rather short Te Deum. The choir was not involved in any of the three works presented in the long first half by the choir's guests, the New Jersey Youth Symphony Orchestra.

It is a good band: firm strings, smooth, cohesive brass section, good wind soloists and strong percussion. But under the cautious, safety-first direction of their conductor, Ankush Kumar Bahl, the music was dull.

Not even the happy-go-lucky atmosphere and nostalgia of Gershwin's An American in Paris ever came to life, such was what appeared to be Bahl's preoccupation with control and clarity, though there were some nice bluesy solos. If ever a work needed some kind of electric charge, it's Bernstein's brooding Symphonic Suite from On the Waterfront. It didn't get one.

Bahl was more demanding in the famous strings-only Adagietto slow movement from Mahler's Symphony No 5. Even though there were minor violin and cello lapses, it was good to hear some expression.

Sadly, it is not possible to say that when the Irish Youth Choir appeared that it rescued the concert. Geoffrey Spratt - the choir's founding conductor - took a tame view of Bruckner's fiery masterpiece.

The powerful unison passages ended up soft-edged and limp, and the potentially plaintive Te ergo quaesumus passed without import. The choir has sounded better.

There was consolation in the clear, intelligently shaped singing of soloists Mary Hegarty, Jenny Bourke, Paul McNamara and Nigel Williams.

Michael Dungan

West Cork Chamber Music Festival
Bantry House, Co Cork

Mozart famously disliked the flute. But that didn't prevent Israeli bassoonist Mordecai Rechtman from preparing an arrangement that presents the composer's fluteless C minor Serenade for wind octet in a version for standard, flute-topped wind quintet.

In the Haffner Wind Ensemble's performance at the West Cork Chamber Music Festival, Rechtman's enterprise sounded rather pot-bellied in balance, the flute's lack of penetration allowing the lower instruments to seem overweight.

However, the Haffner's playing offered all the polish you could have asked for. Their treatment of Dane Carl Nielsen's Wind Quintet of 1922, a piece that concentrates on sharp melodic characterisation and eschews 20th-century angst, was a delight.

Barcelona's Cuarteto Casals devoted their afternoon programme to works by Haydn and Mozart. Their Haydn - the Quartet in B minor, Op 33 No 1 - was lean and clear. The novelties of construction at which Haydn was such a master were paraded with unfailing skill and sensitivity, the inventiveness of his thinking revealed in all its glory.

This was micro-responsive music-making where the only priorities seemed to be those of the music itself. Haydn quartets, strangely, have been a rather thin strand in Bantry. With players like this, and some four score of pieces to explore, the invitation seems obvious.

In Mozart's Hunt Quartet, the players assumed a style that was subtly warmer in tone and colouring, and also a little closer to the everyday norms of quartet playing.

The Romanian composer George Enescu has provided some of the more exotic musical journeys at Bantry over the years. Liza Ferschtman (violin) and Finghin Collins (piano) tackled the rich and slightly convoluted tapestry of his teenage Second Violin Sonata with gusto.

But they didn't quite manage to dispel the feeling that the composer had rather over-reached himself, had wanted to cram more into the piece than he actually knew how to handle.

The Cuarteto Casals made a second appearance, with mezzo soprano Mila Shkirtil on-form in the calm of Respighi's Shelley setting, Il tramonto (The Sunset), and the Swiss Quatuor Terpsycordes made a festival debut in an affectingly plain and plaintive account of Schubert's Quartet in A minor, D804.

The most mesmerising performance of the day came from pianist Elisabeth Leonskaja, presenting herself as a chamber-music chameleon in the less frequently heard of Beethoven's Op 70 piano trios, the one in E flat, where she shape-changed with astonishing freedom, adapting to her partners' (Liza Ferschtman and cellist Peter Bruns) every sway and swerve.

Michael Dervan

Waltons Guitar Festival of Ireland
NCH/Hugh Lane gallery, Dublin

The Los Angeles Guitar Quartet (Scott Tennant, William Kanengiser, John Dearman and Matthew Greif) was the marquee event of the 2007 Waltons Guitar Festival of Ireland.

The festival's efforts and increasing success to date put it in a strong position to develop a wider public beyond their own niche market. But it's a step they need to take - they can't afford for their marquee event not to sell out.

For guitarists - just like choirs and organists - programming is an issue. The audience responded best to the LAGQ playing colourful, guitar-rooted music, such as a mixed set of Brazilian pieces with exciting samba and bossa nova rhythms.

They also particularly enjoyed the Celtic-flavoured Music for a Found Harmonium by Simon Jeffes, arranged by Scott Tennant, and featuring bodhrán and spoons as mimicked by hands and fingertips on the body of the guitar.

Notably, this percussion was as far as technical adventure extended in three concerts, none of which featured tape or live electronics, avenues of contemporary composition which could reasonably be reckoned a profitable direction for an instrument constrained by limited repertoire.

The audience were notably less taken with well-known classical works. Bach's Brandenburg Concerto No 6, for example, was impeccably played in a very clever arrangement.

But these are four equal-voiced instruments - even if you were impressed by the Hallelujah Chorus arranged for four altos, would you want to hear the whole of Messiah that way?

Even William Kanengiser's beautiful arrangement of de Falla's ballet El Amor Brujo - for all its sublime melodic playing and crystal-clear, wordless communication of the narrative - sounded too uniformly understated, all that orchestral range reduced to four guitars, and the well-

known Ritual Fire Dance rendered rather polite.

The festival's final day included a second appearance by John Feeley, this time playing a nicely contrasting selection of his own arrangements of Irish folk songs at the Hugh Lane gallery.

Feeley was then joined by festival director Alec O'Leary and Clive Carroll, featured soloist in the world premiere of the Errigal Suite, an appealing, Donegal-trad-style sequence of dances by David Flynn.