Siobhán Longreviews Smokey Robinson at Vicar Street, Dublin, while Andrew Johnstonereviews Douglas Hollick (organ) St Michael's, Dún Laoghaire. Also reviewed is the West Cork Chamber Music Festival.
Smokey Robinson at Vicar Street, Dublin
Green-eyed Detroit boys don't come round here too often, but when they do, they leave their mark. Smokey Robinson and his 12-piece band rolled into town with a drop-dead repertoire, a picaresque history and a wardrobe to die for.
Almost seven decades are tucked beneath his gym-trimmed belt, which might go some way towards accounting for Smokey Robinson's innate connection with his audience. Although his voice was initially swamped by over-zealous arrangements, he quickly took possession of his magnificent back catalogue, drenching it in an unexpected sensuality, laced with a cracking sense of humour.
Where do you start when you've got such gemstones to choose from? Going To A Go-Go was a hip-swivelling opener, complete with a pair of tangerine-clad dancers who could have ricocheted straight out of Berry Gordy's Motown stable into the bright lights of Thomas Street for a few magical hours.
I Second That Emotion followed hot on its heels, Robinson building a finely-calibrated momentum with the fluency of a performer who's navigated the murky depths of drug addiction and music-industry mayhem with his respect for his audience surprisingly intact.
As his spectacular voice warmed up, Robinson treated us to a well-honed narrative, painting a canvas of songs so diverse, so utterly in tune with the flourishes and failings of the human condition.
His sweeping falsetto bathed Oh Baby Baby in sensual bliss, and then cut and thrust through a Temptations medley that swung from The Way You Do The Things You Do to Get Ready and My Girl, a trio of all-too-brief snapshots of a songwriter in his prime.
Later, after an over-orchestrated treatment of Tears Of A Clown (co-written with Stevie Wonder), Robinson let his voice take centre-stage in earnest as he loped through material from his latest album, Timeless Love.
At times veering way too close to easy listening (particularly with a cover of Fly Me To The Moon), he pulled back with a magnificent reading of Cole Porter's Night And Day, an apt pairing of two songwriters whose musical sensibilities have soared way higher than most.
Later, he revisited The Tracks Of My Tears and turned the drive-in movie staple that is Cruisin' into a remarkable audience participation rite of passage that had every last punter eating out of his hand. Life affirming, heart-stopping music, then, that sent us home finger-clicking, heel-tapping and grinning like complete idiots. Not a bad condition to be in on a November-like night in July. Siobhán Long
Douglas Hollick (organ) St Michael's, Dún Laoghaire
Buxtehude is a perennial composer at the Dún Laoghaire organ series, and in this, the 300th anniversary year of his death, his music is figuring in 10 of the 13 recitals. This concert, given by British Baroque specialist Douglas Hollick, was entirely devoted to this giant of 17th-century organists.
In a 70-minute sequence that roved among the genres of chorale prelude, fantasia, chaconne and fugue, Hollick sampled a baker's dozen of Buxtehude's 90 or so organ works, and spoke illuminatingly about the composer's life and milieu.
Given his affinity with historic instruments, it was understandable that Hollick seemed not entirely to bond with the 1974 Rieger organ, whose aggressive tones are scarcely truer to the actual Baroque style than its angular, functional casework is. His lucid touch nonetheless brought the elevated music to life. The rhetoric avoided any tendency to brashness, ornamentation was neither prodigal nor formulaic, and the textures were enhanced by some crisply executed pedal trills.
Certain moods and tempos were surprising, with a dainty Komm, heiliger Geist BuxWV 199, a march-like Vater unser im Himmelreich BuxWV 219, and a somewhat airy Ciacona BuxWV 160. But the sure registration and easy pace of Nun bitten wir den heiligen Geist BuxWV 208 (played as an unprepared encore in response to prolonged applause) captured an appropriate spirit of earnest supplication.
Of the longer items, the Toccata in F BuxWV 157 created the pleasant sense of celebration without fuss, while the Praeludium in F-sharp minor BuxWV 146 fluently blended the dissimilar musical languages of Frescobaldi, de Grigny and Vivaldi. As a grand finale, the Praeludium in E minor BuxWV 142 was full of stirring reminders that it was intended for the old organ of St Mary's Lübeck, then one of the largest musical instruments in the world. Andrew Johnstone
West Cork Chamber Music Festival - Bantry House, Co Cork
Rain does not disrupt play at the West Cork Chamber Music Festival as it does at Wimbledon. In fact, in getting people indoors, it can be good for the box office. But two other factors did disrupt play on Saturday.
The midday recital by baritone Christian Gerhaher and pianist Gerold Huber was affected by the singer's sore throat. It was to have been an all-Schubert programme, and Gerhaher bravely gave his audience a few songs before calling it a day.
Along the way, however, he offered lengthy spoken introductions to his chosen songs, filling in their backgrounds, placing them in a wider cultural context, and offering fascinating reflections on what he described as "composing poems".
In the end, it was like one of Jorge Luis Borges's short stories, Gerhaher's words describing so suggestively a world in microcosm that everyone who listened to him can still surely treasure in their mind's ear the occasion it might have been.
The evening performance of Fauré's Second Piano Quartet fell prey to the fact that two players arrived having prepared the composer's First and much better-known Piano Quartet. Pianist Polina Leschenko baulked at learning so many notes in so few days, and the performance was rescued when her colleague, Alexander Melnikov, offered to take it on in her place.
His partners in what proved to be generally an extremely robust account of the work were Isabelle Faust (violin), Hartmut Rohde (viola), and David Cohen (cello), with Faust's understated manner more effective here than in any other performances I heard from her.
Understated would not be a word to apply to the Irish/Russian partnership of violinist Catherine Leonard and a fully prepared Polina Leschenko. These two players reined themselves in for Mozart's Sonata in E minor, K304, but the sparks flew between the two of them in sonatas by Schumann (in A minor, Op 105) and Prokofiev (in D, Op 94).
Leschenko's high-attitude approach sometimes turns the music almost upside down or inside out, as she casts a bright spotlight in unexpected places, seeks to thread new musical lines out of the existing notes, or adjusts tempos for maximum surprise or excitement.
Leonard took the challenges in her stride and gave as good as she got, especially in the thrill-enriched account of the Prokofiev.
The day's other works were all strings-only, Haydn's Joke Quartet from a Quatuor Terpsycordes labouring too much over rubato and other fussy detailing, and Shostakovich's Third Quartet from an overwound Kopelman Quartet taking the piece into numbing exaggeration.
The RTÉ Vanbrugh Quartet were joined by Hartmut Rohde for a performance of Dublin-born Charles Villiers Stanford's String Quintet in F, Op 85, of 1903. Stanford was a major figure in the musical life of his time, becoming professor of music at Cambridge, and professor of composition at the Royal College of Music in London, and teaching a whole generation of British composers.
His compositions are solid and well crafted. Here, the quintet showed the well-absorbed influence of Brahms and Mendelssohn, and had some touches of its own.
It worked, but it lacked spark.
