Irish Timeswriters review José Felicianoat the Tripod and NCC/Laytonat the NCH.
José Feliciano, Tripod, Dublin
The unfettered adulation that greeted José Feliciano on his return to Dublin had to be seen to be believed. Particularly since, with an average age of 50-plus, these were no pre-teen punters in hormonal overdrive.
Six-time Grammy award- winner Feliciano obviously inspires loyalty in his fans, some reminiscing about a previous spellbinding appearance of his in the National Stadium more than three decades ago.
Initially, this rampant reverence seemed a tad misplaced, as Feliciano launched into a handful of anthemic songs, each impeccably arranged, but unquestionably the product of years spent in pursuit of the striated US MOR radio market.
She's In My Blood, replete with lush keyboards and leaden percussion, could as easily have emanated from the back catalogue of REO Speedwagon, so laden was it in the big hair and shoulder-pad era of the early 80s.
But then he gave us a glimpse of that legendary finger-picking guitar genius with Dance With Me, albeit against a backdrop of saccharine keyboards and pedestrian bass. From there Feliciano rushed headlong into a series of covers, alighting on everything from his trademark version of Light My Fireto The Beatles I Saw Her Standing There, Listen To The Falling Rainand Knockin' On Heaven's Door.
He found the sweet spot on Bambaleo, our first glimpse of how this musician has rightly cornered the market in guitar genius. His minute attention to detail and forensic control of his instrument led him to a place where few other guitarists dare to venture, where each note takes on a personality all of its own.
We caught further glimpses of his brilliance in an otherwise prosaic cover of That's Alright Mama, but the pyrotechnics had little by way of spirit and were mostly just snapshots of Feliciano showcasing his bag of musical tricks, rather than intricate turns emerging organically from the music.
He left most of the punters in his thrall, but this was Feliciano lite: a crowd-pleasing, dumbed- down version of a musician whose genius would be far better employed in hot pursuit of those Latin rhythms in his blood rather than bogged down in relentlessly middle-of-the-road covers. Siobhán Long
NCC/Layton, National Gallery, Dublin
Arvo Pärt - Bogoróditse Dyévo. Poulenc - Salve Regina. Pawel Lukaszewski - Ave Maria. John Tavener - Mother of God, here I stand. Eric Whitacre - This Marriage. Go lovely rose. I hide myself. Messiaen - Cinq Rechants.
Twentieth-century music may have a bad reputation, but a few extra chairs had to be put out at the National Gallery on Thursday for the latest, 20th- and 21st-century programme in the National Chamber Choir's Eternal Feminine series.
Some members of the audience were moved to give a standing ovation at the end of Messiaen's Cinq Rechants.
Cinq Rechantsis actually the least well-known of Messiaen's Tristan and Isolde-inspired trilogy of the 1940s, which also includes the song-cycle Harawi and the Turangalîla-Symphonie.
Thursday's performance used all 17 voices of the National Chamber Choir rather than the composer's specified 12 soloists. This allowed for moments of extra richness and the almost ecstatic incantations of the female solos in this intense piece were strongly taken.
Arvo Pärt's Bogoróditse Dyévo, John Tavener's Mother of God, here I stand (from his night-long The Veil of the Temple) and the three pieces by US composer Eric Whitacre were all much softer in surface. The Pärt was short and sounded both simple and full. The Tavener was calm, with gentle brushes of dissonance, but a bit bland. The pieces by Whitacre were full of sweet, resonant commonplaces.
Polish composer Pawel Lukaszewski's Ave Maria (using just those two words as its text) began in a mode that sounded like the triadic harmony equivalent of those explorations of sonority that were once a feature of the Polish avant-garde. The piece made direct obeisance to that avant-garde before returning to its opening mode.
Poulenc's Salve Regina, written in 1941, brought out the very best in the choir. Guest conductor Stephen Layton directed a performance of secure stylishness that handled the music's occasional harmonic surprises with expert timing.
It may have been the oldest piece in the programme, but in many ways it also sounded the freshest. - Michael Dervan
