Tony Clayton-Lea reviews Patti Smith at Vicar Street in Dublin and Michael Dervan attends Daniel Reuss at the NCC.
Patti Smith,
Vicar Street, DUBLIN
At almost 60 years of age, Patti Smith has good reason to be treated with the type of respect that not only age carries with it, but also for her stance on issues ranging from peace in our time, the widespread mistreatment of children and the exultant embracing of the spiritual/pagan nature of mankind.
For nigh on 30 years she has been at the forefront of a niche movement: punk rock transmogrified into healing's "vital realms".
She wears it well, too, although the capacity audience on Thursday night took some time getting used to the witchy, twitchy display of occasionally shamanistic rock on offer.
The truth is, Smith is at her very, very best when she and her band play it tight, which is why songs such as Free Money, People Have The Power, Break It Up (co-writer Tom Verlaine's guitar is sorely missing tonight) and Because The Night are all quite assertive, attenuated punk and therefore immensely stirring.
She's even very good at the voodoo ritualisations of essentially improvisational songs such as Gandhi and Radio Baghdad: they each start off slow and tense and end up furious and all over the place, sonic spittle showering the front rows. She fails - and it's a failure associated with lack of pacing more than anything else - when she places her poetry into the mix. It's genuine and earnest and ostensibly full of meaning, but it's an art form that doesn't necessarily belong on stage with garage rock, spectral punk and an audience keen on hearing the better known album tracks.
But then there's Patti Smith the performer: where once she was the androgynous, astonishingly beautiful figure of Horses fame - photographed by Robert Mapplethorpe through a viewfinder of envy and lust - now she is equally iconic but slightly less graceful.
She moves (and sings) with equal parts soulfulness and stridency, occasionally the one balancing out the other.
And yet she means it all, which is far preferable to the many fakes out there milking their fame and back catalogue for all its worth.
Smith's music and muse is of the call-to-arms variety, and her demeanour is one of insurgent dignity in the face of pathetic deceit. We have a name for that in these parts: Mother Courage. - Tony Clayton-Lea
NCC/Daniel Reuss
National Gallery, Dublin
Josquin - Missa de Beata Vergine (exc).
Gallus - Orietur stella.
Vytautas Barkauskas - I am Greeting the Earth.
Diepenbrock - Wanderers Nachtlied. Escher - Songs of Love and Eternity. Micha Hamel - Hinniker van Craquelá.
The Dutch conductor Daniel Reuss, principal conductor of the RIAS Kammerchor in Berlin, made his début with the National Chamber Choir at the National Gallery on Thursday.
His programme included the premiére of fellow-countryman Micha Hamel's Hinniker van Craquelé (Neigher of crackle), the fifth in the NCC's series of commissions inspired by paintings in the collection of the National Gallery.
Hamel went to Dutch poet Lucas Hüsgen for his text and actually allowed the writer to make his own choice - Karel Dujardin's The Riding School - from the gallery's 17th-century Dutch collection.
Hamel chose to make a complex, idealistic setting of Hüsgen's text, breaking the choir up into groups to represent the elements of the picture: man and horse (three singers each) to the fore, cypresses (seven voices) in the background, and, in the middle distance, a group of four men singing what the composer calls a barbershop setting of WB Yeats's At Galway Races.
If this seems like a recipe for confusion, that's actually how it sounded on Thursday.
From where I was seated, the music of the four groups was well blended, rather than distinct by the time it reached me.
Hamel requested that the barbershop group face away from the audience, but in the absence of a closed-circuit TV monitor, they sang facing outwards so that the specified effect of their being "not clearly audible because of the distance" remained unrealised.
Hüsgen's poem imagines the horse being led to the slaughterhouse, and the layering of Hamel's extremely demanding vocal writing certainly creates a music of oppressive density, an impression intensified by the Babel-like interaction of the various groups, especially when the cypresses engage in rapid gabbling. The choir's handling of their heavy-duty task was extremely impressive.
They were equally fine in the earlier works, and Reuss, taking his cue, perhaps, from the layout of the Hamel, explored a range of other layouts during the concert.
The singers were interleaved (in terms of vocal parts) in a semi-circle at the back of the stage for smooth performances of the Kyrie, Sanctus and Agnus Dei from Josquin's Missa de Beata Vergine and Gallus's Orietur Stella.
They formed themselves into a closer semi-circle, now arrayed by voice type, for Lithuanian composer Vytautas Barkauskas's 1978 Sveikinu Zeme (I am Greeting the Earth) - in the absence of a translation it was impossible to work out the composer's purpose in setting clear lines against chattering backgrounds - and the Brahmsian Wandrers Nachtlied by the Dutchman Alphons Diepenbrock (1862-1921).
And they re-formed themselves yet again, into the conventional two-line format for another Dutch work, the strangely lugubrious Emily Dickinson settings of Songs of Love and Eternity by Rudolf Escher (1912-1980). -Michael Dervan
