Today's reviews from the Irish Times journalists
Izumi Kimura
Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin
Pianist Izumi Kimura played 10 short pieces by seven living Irish composers to open this year's Sunday at Noon series of free one-hour concerts at the Hugh Lane Gallery. All 10 pieces were written between 1986 and 2000.
Kimura demonstrated heroic levels of technical fearlessness, stamina and strength in a programme dominated by flying, rumbling bass lines, hard-driven rhythms and counter-rhythms, and thousands upon thousands of notes, however short the individual pieces (nothing longer than five minutes, many around just two).
Three of these performance-resistant works were originally designed for reducing 12 semi-finalists to six finalists as specially commissioned test-pieces at the Axa Dublin International Piano Competition. As well as tossing off the pianistic challenges with apparent ease, Kimura captured the hint of humour in Kevin O'Connell's Étude 2000 and the mad, biological mischief implicit in Triorchic Blues by Gerald Barry, whose 90-second Swinging Tripes and Trillibubkins drew the briefest of chuckles from the otherwise impassive performer. She also created a breathing, slow-burn climax out of the gentle interlude that temporarily arrests the frantic action in Fergus Johnston's The Oul' Winda Rag.
She brought the same energy and flair to aptly named pieces in the same vein by Ronan Guilfoyle (Toccata and Feud) and Johnston (Bog Boogie), and to Philip Hammond's African Black, with its pentatonic, African-folk element on the black notes and its Parisian-sounding interruptions - now the Stravinsky of Petroushka, now Ravel - on the white.
Kimura interspersed the helter-skelter with a more reflective, often intimate style of playing. This emerged in homage pieces for Joseph Groocock by Johnston and for Morton Feldman by Paul Hayes, and in the wistfulness of Ian Wilson's A Haunted Heart.
Sunday at Noon continues weekly throughout the winter and into next summer. E-mail updates from gmusic@indigo.ie
Michael Dungan
Wolfgang Holzmair, Imogen Cooper
National Gallery, Dublin
Schubert - Schwanengesang and other songs
In physical presence, the Austrian baritone Wolfgang Holzmair seems hardly to have aged since his first appearance in Ireland, back in 1992.
His programme at the National Gallery on Sunday evening revisited the same territory as his Irish debut, but with very different results.
Holzmair's tone has hardened over the years, and on Sunday there were moments when his control faltered, to produce uncertainties of intonation and an inappropriateness of colouring that would once have been unthinkable. There were also times when his tone faltered, and also a tendency for moments of intensity to default to a manner that spoke more of emotional venom than anything else, even when this seemed quite wide of the import of the text.
Schubert's Schwanengesang (Swan Song) is treated as the composer's final song-cycle, although it's not actually a song-cycle at all. Holzmair acknowledges this fact by integrating some other songs, making a minor change of order, and presenting the whole as an almost unbroken sequence, with just a short pause for him, as it were, to take his breath.
That pause seems to have been crucial in this performance. All of the issues that were conspiring to make the singer sound unlike his familiar self were ameliorated after the short break.
It helped, of course, that venom was entirely appropriate to the song with which he resumed, Der Atlas, depicting the emotional misery of someone who bears a world of pain. But even when the manner was not quite as pressured, the familiar resourceful subtlety of Holzmair's way with words and music could be enjoyed afresh.
In this kind of mode, and with pianist Imogen Cooper a partner as minutely responsive as ever, one would have been happy to listen to him all night.
Michael Dervan
