"Original" - it was an artistic concept that he considered more a curse than a blessing, yet it is difficult to find a better adjective to describe the spiky, tangential imagination of English playwright Dennis Potter.
Only he could turn on its head AE Housman's poetic rural idyll of "blue remembered hills" and "the land of lost content" and go on to create this deceptively simple yet devastatingly powerful play.
Bruiser's artistic director Lisa May has, sensibly and sensitively, taken Potter's edgy, naturalistic text completely at face value, and her cast of six young adults make an excellent job both of the child roles and the rich, thickly accented vernacular of the Forest of Dean in Gloucestershire, the enclosed little leafy world where Potter lived for much of his life.
There is something ever-so-slightly unsettling about watching adults act out the apparently innocent, frequently cruel rituals of childhood and a chilling accuracy in the way that the cast nails the playground atmosphere of wartime England, with their games of dive-bombers and Japs and Germans and escaped prisoners of war. But queasier still are the very knowing tussles between bullies and victims, flirtatious, broody girls and posturing boys who fire imaginary guns and kill small animals for sport. Angie Waller, Gerard McCabe, Richard Clements, Michael Condron, Paul Mallon and Susan Crothers are an impressive ensemble of friends, while Stephen Daly's pinched, terrified face is hard to forget as the cowed Donald, whose heart-breaking home life propels him into a very grown-up and effectively realised final tragedy. - Jane Coyle
In Belfast until tomorrow, then tours to Limerick, Downpatrick, Strabane, Coleraine, Omagh, Armagh, Enniskillen, Monaghan, Castlebar, Antrim, Derry, Carrickmore, Ballina, Mullingar and Thurles
Death in Dún Laoghaire - Fenton Gallery, Cork
While I appreciate the need for an artist's statement (and in most cases enjoy reading them), there are times when they can simply get in the way and detract from the show. The accompanying self-penned text to Gary Coyle's display of photographs - Death in Dún Laoghaire - is however, unequivocally successful. His style of prose is fully in tune with the imagery, each complementing the other with effortless synergy.
Both image and text are unpretentious, heartfelt meditations on growing up and living in the Dublin satellite town, documented with disarming simplicity and candour. The subjects have a matter-of-fact quality and are unremarkable insofar as you might pass them every day. But Coyle is discerning as he captures the scenes at the very moment they appear to fade in the twilight or sink into the artificial glow of street lights, giving a ghostly ethereal quality to the images.
The unifying theme that connects everything is, as the title intimates, death - be it Coyle pondering his own demise or reflecting upon the loss of those he has known since childhood. Each image then becomes a flashback or premonition of where a death has or will occur - a cliff top, a train platform, a dark alleyway and so on. The nanosecond of the camera shutter closing is analogous with the archiving of images buried within the subconscious mind. These, then, are empty stages standing cold and desolate, waiting inexorably for a reunion with the doomed actor to complete this mortal coil.
That this demise may not be poetic, but rather sordid or tragic, is driving the emotional resonance of these images. But surprisingly, the sense of melancholia is not intransigent, as there is a romantic aesthetic at work that is, oddly enough, joyous and uplifting. - Mark Ewart
Runs until Oct 6
David Grealy (organ) Pro-Cathedral, Dublin
Franck - Choral No 3. Prélude, Fugue et Variation. Vierne - Berceuse. Intermezzo. Dupré - Prelude and Fugue in G minor
David Grealy is the Pro-Cathedral's organ scholar, and this was his first Dublin recital. In almost all the more important aspects of musical performance, it proved an auspicious debut.
Many young players acquire a physical mastery of this ultimate machine of music; but combining that craft with the deeper aspects of music-making is another matter. So it was consistently rewarding to hear how strongly Grealy prioritised purely musical values. For that purpose this was a well-judged programme - a sequence of French works, mostly of moderate difficulty, but with many opportunities for subtle expression.
The three featured composers were working at a time when the organ's capacity for orchestral dress was at its height, and often they wrote accordingly. One of the most telling aspects of Grealy's playing was his ability to home in on those characteristics.
The main melody of Franck's Prélude, Fugue et Variation was paced and shaped as if played by an oboist, with full breaths between phrases and an awareness of long-spun line that served this piece, and the same composer's Choral no 3, very well indeed.
Although Grealy's technique is not yet highly honed, he went fearlessly at the programme's highest technical challenges, which came in the humorous and quirky lightness of the Intermezzo from Vierne's Pièces de Fantaisie Op 51, and in Dupré's Prelude and Fugue in G minor. The fugue went with a brisk bounce; and despite the occasional technical blip, the performance epitomised the recital's strengths in presenting music intelligently and expressively. It was good to hear a young player who is naturally inclined to think beyond his instrument. - Martin Adams
QuintEssential Sackbut and Cornett Ensemble, Julia Doyle - East Cork Early Music Festival
The British period-instruments group the QuintEssential Sackbut and Cornett Ensemble, which opened the East Cork Early Music Festival at Cloyne Cathedral, might best be seen as a rough equivalent of the modern brass quintet.
QuintEssential runs to rather more than five players, but focuses most of its attention on two instruments, the sackbut, a more softly-spoken precursor of the modern trombone, and the cornett, a strange, curved hybrid that's fingered like a recorder but has a mouthpiece like a brass instrument, and has a sound that combines aspects of the trumpet with characteristics that are at times hauntingly reminiscent of the human voice.
The title of this programme, Musica Transalpina, was borrowed from a collection of Italian madrigals published in 17th-century England. The first half of the evening focused mostly on the Italian side of things (pieces by the Gabrielis and some lesser-known figures), the second mostly on the English (Dowland's being the best-known name), with two pieces from the original Musica Transalpina collection strategically placed towards the end.
The players seemed to take some time to warm up, showing early signs of flexibility in intonation and ensemble that were not to the music's advantage. Upbeat presentation and sharp musical definition are not this group's hallmarks. Their manner is often rather loose, though some of the players do rise to bursts of virtuosity.
Fiona Russell did a star turn on cornett in the Lassus/Bassano Susanne ung jour, and the keyboard player Kathryn Cok, who moved between organ and harpsichord, flew nimbly up and down the latter in John Bull's My Selfe. In general, the English music of the second half was communicated with a sharper focus than the Italian work before the interval.
The vocal numbers showed guest soprano Julia Doyle to have one of those beautifully pure, chaste-sounding, emotionally-reserved, early-music voices. She didn't really get much of a chance to shine, as most of what she sang called on parts of her vocal range that were easily masked by the instruments.
When she was not blending in with her colleagues but rising above them she revealed a sound with a musically exciting edge, and a communicative immediacy that most of the music-making had lacked. That immediacy was present, too, in the evening's single encore, where two of the players switched to bagpipes, with predictably rousing results. - Michael Dervan
François Couturier - NCH John Field Room, Dublin
The opportunity to hear the French pianist François Couturier with the quartet - completed by Anja Lechner (cello), Jean-Marc Larché (soprano) and Jean-Louis Matinier (accordion) - that made his recording of Nostalghia: Song for Tarkovsky, in most respects lived up to expectations.
In fact, generally speaking, it exceeded them. The quartet's exquisite sense of dynamics, the textural variety and balance achieved from such a limited instrumentation, the sheer clarity of both the written and the improvised within Couturier's compositions and the superb playing made for some memorable music.
Performed without an interval, the music, which Couturier wrote as a tribute to the great Russian film director Andrei Tarkovsky, followed the same sequence as the recording issued last year on ECM. That meant opening and closing with Le Sacrifice and L'éternel retour, the pieces inspired by Erbarme Dich from Bach's St Matthew Passion.
The tone was thus set for a recital that was, if labels are required, more classical in nature than jazz. Couturier has said, and it's true, that one can enjoy the music without knowing the films and individuals to which it refers, but there's little doubt that any knowledge of Tarkovsky's work would confirm the evocative power of Couturier's compositions.
The shifting colours of Crépusculaire clearly reflect the play with light, colour and form of the late cinematographer, Sven Nykvist, for instance, while the insistent underpinning that supports the cello and soprano lines of Nostalghia can be taken as an ideal echo of the quest at the core of that film.
It's easy to go on seeking parallels like this, but what matters is the music. It is, for the most part, very sparse and understated, often very melodic, with dramatic contrasts achieved in restless, even violent episodes. There is scarcely a gratuitous flourish, despite the fact that one of the two freely improvised episodes, involving a long, unaccompanied soprano excursion, overstayed its welcome.
It's perhaps unfair to single out one person from such a superbly focused and unified quartet, but Anja Lechner was outstanding - brilliant in the written parts and with a marvellous sense of what was appropriate when required to improvise. The pity was that she, and the quartet, had such a small attendance because of the clash with another great ECM artist, Tomasz Stanko, who was appearing in Vicar Street the same evening. - Ray Comiskey
