Irish Times reviewers on a selection of events around the country.
Antti Siirala (piano)
Aula Maxima, NUI Galway
Beethoven - Sonata in F minor Op 2 No 1. Eroica Variations. Sibelius - Romance Op 24 No 9. Reverie Op 58 No 1. Brahms - Sonata in F minor Op 5.
Antti Siirala, the first prizewinner at the AXA Dublin International Piano Competition last May, went on to take both the first prize and the audience prize at the Leeds International Piano Competition last month.
He's not due to play in Dublin again until next year, so his engagement for Music for Galway was the first opportunity Irish audiences had to hear him since his success at Leeds transformed him into one of the hottest properties among young pianists.
Siirala's musical personality encompasses an intriguing mix of those qualities that are often characterised in black and white as classical and romantic.
His playing of the Sonata in F minor from Beethoven's Op 2 and the Variations in E flat, Op. 35 (which use a theme now best known from the finale of the Eroica Symphony) was carefully sculpted, showing a deep awareness of the objectivity and slightly de-personalised precision sought after by the first generation of musicians to devour Urtext editions, 40 or 50 years ago.
Yet, coupled with the strict observance of detail there was a freedom in colouring and also an elasticity of shape achieved by the tiniest of adjustments which invested the playing with a wealth of individual character.
Siirala managed that rare feat of seeming to have the best of both worlds without any compromising of the music.
His handling of two short and very slight pieces by his compatriot, Jean Sibelius, showed again some of the tonal wizardry he had used in his performance of the Debussy Études in the Dublin Competition. But the real wonder of the evening was his playing of Brahms's Sonata in F minor, the last and most successful of the composer's piano sonatas.
The 20-year-old Brahms invested this work with a passion and poignancy that are anything but easy to contain. The piece wants to burst and wilt in ways that can be damaging to its musical coherence. Siirala dealt with these problems reflectively, tempering the ardour with a sense of distance that still fully conveyed the nature of the heat involved.
Music for Galway's Steinway is two sizes down from a concert grand, and presents extreme challenges in repertoire as uncompromising in its tonal demands as this particular sonata.
Siirala's resolution of these problems was seamlessly effective. The music-making seemed unfettered in scale and was often astonishing in the sheer beauty of sound that was achieved.
If there was a limitation here, it was in the fact that the pacing seemed very slow, as if Brahms had slightly mis-gauged the balance of speeds within the piece. There was a similar slackening of tension towards the end of the Beethoven Variations. But in the Brahms the effect also allowed listeners to live longer in the many gorgeous moments of what was an unusually persuasive performance.
-Michael Dervan
Vincent in Brixton
Grand Opera House, Belfast Festival
In 1873, a naive young Dutchman arrived in London, following in the family tradition of working for a firm of international art dealers. At that stage, nobody, least of all Vincent Van Gogh himself, had any inkling of the artistic genius that lay beneath his earnest, plain-spoken exterior. By chance, he finds lodgings in the progressive household of Ursula Loyer, a handsome, cultured woman, who has been in physical and psychological mourning for her dead French husband for more than 15 years. While initially attracted to her spirited daughter, Eugenie (Emma Darwell-Smith), Vincent slowly comes to a realisation that his soul-mate is Ursula herself.
Through their passionate, intensely erotic meeting of minds, dark secrets and longings are unlocked, which will ultimately and inevitably destroy them both. Nicholas Wright has crafted a sublime piece of drama out of the letters Vincent wrote home to his younger brother Theo, during the three years he spent in London and, briefly, Paris. As is the case with young men writing home, the real truths lie not in what is said, but in what is not said. Wright has masterfully filled these gaps with a fascinating examination of both the liberating and imprisoning effects of love upon a troubled, suppressed genius.
This gorgeous production carries all the hallmarks of a top drawer National Theatre production, with the inspirational hand of its former artistic director Richard Eyre at the helm. Designer Tim Hatley's recreation of the Loyer kitchen is a real working environment, belching steam and heat, a place where meals are prepared and ideas allowed to take shape.
Young Dutch actor Ruben Brinkman is sweetly appealing as the eager young innocent and heart-breaking as the deranged being who emerges in the space of just three years. And Clare Higgins deserves every one of the many awards she has won for her earthy, sensual portrayal of a woman who holds off encroaching old age when she finds herself in love - and loved. The warmth and lyricism of the first act give way to fractured emotions in the second, as Vincent returns from Paris, his mind full of religion but his tortured imagination, directed by Ursula towards one of his earliest and best-known paintings - her final, lasting gift to him..
- Jane Coyle
Vincent in Brixton is at the Belfast Grand Opera House until tomorrow. The festival continues until November 9th
RTÉ Vanbrugh String Quartet
Emo Court
Weigl - Quartet No 5. Zemlinsky - Quartet No 3. Webern - Langsamer Satz. Brahms - Quartet in C minor Op 51 No 1.
The RTÉ Vanbrugh Quartet's latest tour, which opened at Emo Court, sports a Viennese programme with a difference.
Among the featured composers, Johannes Brahms had a high regard for the young Alexander Zemlinsky, whose career he helped to further. Zemlinsky gave Arnold Schoenberg his only formal tuition in composition, and was also the teacher of Karl Weigl. And Schoenberg, of course, also numbered Anton von Webern among his pupils.
The four works, written over a period of six decades, were performed in reverse chronological order, though the effect of this sequencing was not exactly what might have been expected.
The largely forgotten Weigl shied away in maturity from developments he had embraced when young. His Fifth Quartet, written in 1933, harks back to the musical certainties of the 19th century - Schoenberg's letter of introduction on Weigl's emigration to the US in 1938 called him "one of the best composers of the old school".
Zemlinsky's condensed and angular Third Quartet of 1924 took the composer as far as he dared to go in balancing old values against things frighteningly new. It remains a slightly uncomfortable work.
Webern's Slow movement of 1905 is an unfettered romantic outpouring, written during the summer he consummated his love affair with his cousin, Wilhelmina, whom he would later marry.
Brahms's First Quartet contains in many respects the seeds of all the other music, the lyricism, the detailed motivic working out, the awareness of the past. And it sounded all the more prophetic for being placed at the end of the programme.
The Vanbrughs played everything with their familiar intensity, though their focus on individual linear integrity sometimes sacrificed clarity of harmonic direction.
They found the best balance of opposing tendencies in the Brahms, the piece where the composer also scored the greatest success in keeping those tendencies in equilibrium. Here they played a passion that was at all times absorbing.
- Michael Dervan
Tours to Kilmallock (tonight), Tuam (tomorrow), Dublin (Sunday) and Drogheda (Monday). Details from tel: 01-2082765.
Homefront
Andrews Lane Studio
Ciaran Creagh's new play has a well-worn form, the study of a group of characters under stress. In setting it in the trenches of the first World War, however, he chooses too easy a target, with three battle-weary privates waiting to be sent over the top, a sinister corporal and a namby-pamby captain. This is the stuff of melodrama.
The privates - Rasher, Pakie and Eamo - are Irish survivors of prolonged battles, and they speak of home with nostalgia. It transpires that the corporal, from Northern Ireland, met Rasher's brother in Dublin, and knew him to be a republican. When the news of the 1916 rebellion arrives, the corporal and captain conspire to send Rasher to certain death. Heavy stuff.
It gets heavier. The three friends, learning of the plot, create some mutinous mayhem and make an improbable bid for freedom, clearly doomed to failure, though not thus signalled. But there are other failures. The characters are all Johnny One-notes, so contrived as to lack credibility, and the play's structure cannot sustain the weight of the author's intentions. Despite an ear for naturalistic dialogue, he does not use it here to generate dramatic tension.
The hour-long play brushes by what might have been a solid core, the angst of men fighting for an old enemy separately engaged in defeating their own people. But there is little philosophy or analysis here. Edward Coughlan directs David Layde, Macdara Deery, Donal Courtney, Mark Hewitt and Maurice Collins, all of whom act with conviction; but there is no redemption for this one.
- Gerry Colgan
Runs to November 8th
