Michael Durkan was at the NCO to hear Finghin Collins, while Edward Power checked out electropop survivors St Etienne at the Olympia. Douglas Sealy was at the Hugh Lane Gallery for a Sunday recital from the National Chamber Choir.
Finghin Collins (piano), NSO/Gerhard Markson, National Concert Hall
Piano Concerto No 2. Stanford
Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune Debussy
Symphony No "0" Bruckner
programme from the National Symphony Orchestra was one of echoes and pre-echoes. The most immediately blatant of those in Stanford's Second Piano Concerto of 1911 have been attributed to the fact that the composer - who was born in Dublin 150 years ago - began the work shortly after he had conducted Rachmaninov's Second Concerto at the Leeds Festival in 1910. But Rachmaninov is not alone in being echoed by Stanford: the ghosts of Brahms and Tchaikovsky are prominent too.
The D minor Symphony which Bruckner declared null and void is known in German as Die Nullte, and in English as Symphony No "0". This work, which he dropped from his numbered canon in 1872, was once thought to have dated from 1863 and 1864. Modern scholarship asserts that it was actually composed in 1869, rather than merely revised then. This later dating makes its distinct pre-echoes the D minor Symphony, which is now No 3 and which was begun in 1872, much easier to understand.
Debussy's Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune, which was first heard in 1894, doesn't so much pre-echo as prefigure some of the major musical developments of the 20th century, to the point where it has been dubbed the first piece of 20th-century music.
Finghin Collins played the Stanford as if he were having a ball of a time. He played fluently, with a certain swagger, and cut a straight-faced path through many of the ghost-haunted passages which it is not so easy to listen to with a similarly straight face.
Straightness was a feature, too, of conductor Gerhard Markson's handling of the Debussy. There's a surging sensual warmth to this music which his clean-sounding account rather bypassed.
His delivery of the Bruckner, the opening of the orchestra's complete cycle of the symphonies, was tight, with well-maintained forward thrust and clean lines. The sharpness of the etching left the music a little short on mystery, but the haunting quality of the simple chordal progressions which open the slow movement was well caught, and the Scherzo flew at the quicksilver tempo the composer specified.
The string textures came across in quiet passages with a feeling of soft, Brucknerian nap. But, at the other end of the scale, there were a few key moments where the violins hit overdrive problems. It will be interesting to see how this issue is resolved as the cycle develops and the demands become even greater. Michael Dervan
St Etienne, Olympia Theatre, Dublin
Electropop survivors St Etienne are an enchanting jumble of contradictions. Striving to approximate Kraftwerk's robotic detachment, they cannot quite bring themselves to renounce a perplexing nostalgia for 1960s kitsch which even Austin Powers might reject as excessively twee.
In concert, the London quartet quit dithering and plumped assuredly for Teutonic gravity. Crouched behind a wall of synthesisers (a po-faced Kraftwerk homage, presumably), keyboard player Bob Stanley and two anonymous, scowling companions presided over an exhilarating soufflé of shuffles, bleeps and crunching beats. Perched coyly at the edge of the stage, vocalist Sarah Cracknell seemed to have beamed in from another dimension entirely - a velveteen Twilight Zone where Marks and Spencer casual-wear and glittery high heels are deemed the epitome of insouciant rebellion.
Hyperactive imminent single Soft Like Me - featuring London female rapper Wildflower - suggested a downbeat retread of recent Sugababes' hit Round Round. Cathartic Finisterre highlight B92 culminated in a percussive freak-out which set the audience gyrating frantically in the aisles.
Bleak, bold and unrelentingly sinister - who would have thought St Etienne had it in them? Edward Power
National Chamber Choir, Fergal Caulfield (piano)/Celso Antunes,
Hugh Lane Gallery
recital at noon in the Hugh Lane Gallery fell into three sections: in the first was music from the 16th and 17th centuries, by Janequin, Arcadelt, Gibbons and Banchieri, in the madrigal tradition.
Purity of tone and clarity of line is a sine qua non of this music and there was no lack of either in the National Chamber Choir's performance; Celso Antunes so shaped the rise and fall of the phrases that the listener experienced both formal and emotional satisfaction.
In the second section the music became, as he said with a twinkle in his eye, serious and therefore German. Certainly, Im Herbst op.104 no.5 and Quartette op.92 (this latter for choir and piano) were both typical of Brahms at his most serious, but Antunes made the seriousness exciting by diversifying the textures and carefully building up to climaxes. In a lighter vein but in a similar sound world were Dvorak's Songs of Nature op. 63 nos 1&5.
Rossini's La Passegiata had the tunefulness of a gondolier's song and, with Bizet's Valse avec choeur (both of these with piano) provided an interlude before the third section, music from the 20th century.
Sylvia O'Brien was a poignant soloist in the Cole Porter and Fergal Caulfield, at the piano, contributed largely to the period atmosphere. Douglas Sealy
