Irish Timeswriters review a selection of events.
Hans Pålsson (piano)
Coach House, Dublin Castle
Mozart - Sonata in A K331. Schubert - Sonata in A minor D845.
Beethoven - Variations and Fugue in E flat Op 35 (Eroica). Sonata in A flat Op 110.
String players rightly aspire to possess a first-class instrument. And if they can't actually afford the quality of instrument they need, there's always the chance of finding a foundation or an investor willing to make a loan from their collection.
Pianists are altogether less fortunate. They play on what the venue or promoter provides, and usually don't get to sample each concert's piano until shortly before the performance. The quality of the pianos used in concerts has been on the rise in Ireland, happily eradicating memories of a time when there was no Steinway concert grand for hire in Dublin.
It seems very strange, then, for the Music Network, which calls itself the national music development agency, to remind listeners of the bad old days, by furnishing Swedish pianist Hans Pålsson with a short grand piano for the Dublin leg of his current tour. Yes, the venue is small. But the issue is not one of volume but of quality of sound. Concert grands are called concert grands for a reason, and Music Network does no favours either to performers or listeners by ignoring that fact.
Pålsson has had over 60 works dedicated to him, and has been involved in over 30 broadcasts of a Swedish TV series called I döda mästares sällskap (In the Company of Dead Masters).
It's the dead masters he's always focused on in his Irish programmes, and in the concerts I've heard him give, he treats them with an unusually free hand. The composer asks for pianissimo? Never mind. A healthy forte will do. The composer writes it plain? Never mind. We can slip in some extra notes here and there.
The strongest impression from his playing on Tuesday was of caprice and arbitrariness. Even on a small piano, he showed a considerable range of colour. And, yes, there were occasional imaginative touches that worked.
But mostly he played everything on the programme as if he had taken ownership at the expense of the composer. He speeded up and slowed down, got louder and softer, added or omitted accents and repeats for no apparent reason. And, sadly, on the small piano Music Network provided, the results were often far from easy on the ear. On tour until Mon. Michael Dervan
Orpheus
Cork Opera House
Opera Works is building on its strengths with its use of the Cork Children's Chorus in this adaptation of Gluck's famous opera. It is a work that has also been famously amended, although rarely to such a degree as here, with new recitatives and choral arrangements, a mixture of languages and a 19-year-old lead singer.
The chorus is tuneful, well-drilled (the voice coach is Sonya Keogh) and often compelling in its vocal composure. This matters greatly at times, as with with the integral "no!" from the spirits of the underworld, refusing the appeals of Orpheus for the restoration of his beloved wife Eurydice, and the young voices also have an appropriately eerie quality when stretched. But they can be stretched too far; although their diction is always excellent, their accomplishment, remarkable in itself, can't quite manage the changes in language and phrasing demanded by this adaptation.
Singing an unornamented version of the title role and given an oratorio stance centre-stage for most of the hour-long performance, Benjamin Russell is also remarkable. His pleasant and well-managed voice is an emerging instrument, mature enough to handle the recitatives as rewritten by Declan Hassett and showing some colour and even emotional quality in the arias.
This production, directed by Jillian Keiley, may be filleted Gluck, but the central role is still demanding and the singer needs musical support. Harp, cello and electronic organ are not enough: the experimental synthesis conducted by John O'Brien is revealed as so inadequate as to remind everyone of the dangers inherent in offering a Ladybird Books edition of a splendid - and well-known - original. Mary Leland
Simple Kid
Whelan's, Dublin
Ciaran McFeely's first album, Simple Kid 1, was released to some acclaim in 2003, and seemed to indicate a promising future. His lo-fi indie creations, with their shimmering pop sensibility, immediately brought to mind Beck, Blur's Graham Coxon, Flaming Lips, even Sean Lennon, but the collage of influences never truly cohered into a unique Simple Kid sound. Simple Kid 2 was released last year, and again demonstrated McFeely's way with a tune and his witty lyrics, but the music hadn't progressed much, despite the three-year gestation - the march of time merely made his songs redolent of a music scene that had passed.
The result is that McFeely has never found the audience he probably deserves, but there were plenty of committed Simple Kid fans in the enthusiastic but modest crowd in Whelan's.
He took to the stage with a hairband holding in his voluminous, curly hair, looking more Vitas Gerulaitis than Björn Borg. An Apple laptop doubled as both backing band and, via a projector, visual effects provider, and was simultaneously McFeely's biggest strength and biggest weakness.
The first few songs, L'il King Kong and A Song of Stone, were accompanied by a projection of the music software Logic Express as it played the backing beats and strings. The effect was rather like being in a new music technologies tutorial, and also meant the audience could predict to the very beat when any given song would end - there was no room for improvisation with this backing band.
But when he finally started adding visuals to the songs - such as a karaoke-style lyric sheet for The Ballad of Elton John and Serotonin, a duet with Kermit the Frog, footage of the English wrestler Big Daddy, even a clip from Werner Herzog's Stroszek - the show moved up a gear. McFeely looks and behaves like a Wes Anderson character, and his music isn't a million miles from the director's whimsical form either. If he manages to produce the entertainment more consistently, and replaces his trusty laptop with an actual band, we should be hearing more from Simple Kid. Davin O'Dwyer
