Irish Times reviewers saw The Electric Picnic, LeAnn Rimes, Catherine Bott and ensemble and the Ulster Orchestra.
The Electric Picnic
Stradbally, Co Laois
With the sun beating down as if it had finally developed a conscience about all those mud-soaked festival outings of summers past, the 500-acre surroundings of Stradbally Hall bristled in unforgiving heat as the final festival of the season got down to its avowed aim of offering a completely new festival experience.
Four stages - main stage, electric stage (dance), bodytonic stage (hardcore dance) and the international comedy club stage - ringed a site that also included a massage and yoga area, paintball, picnic areas and Stradbally Hall itself.
While the Electric Stage was getting everyone in the mood with a live screening of Ireland's 3-0 victory over Cyprus at the start of the World Cup campaign, Arrested Development got things going on the main stage.
Their distinctive mix of funk and hip-hop roused the crowd, although apart from their early 1990s hits Everyday People and Mr Wendal, the set proved to be largely anonymous.
Over in the comedy tent, MC Des Bishop rattled off a few old chestnuts as he introduced Colin Murphy, Jason Byrne, Eddie Bannon, Gerry Mallon and the brilliant Tommy Tiernan.
For unexplained reasons, veteran reggae man Lee Scratch Perry never made it to the main stage, but the afternoon was wound down with solid shows from David Kitt and the Detroit Cobras.
With dusk falling, Belgian electro-rockers Soulwax took to the main stage and quickly had the PA groaning beneath their cranked-up sound, causing many bemused dance fans to take to their heels in search of the chill-out tent. Band of the day Super Furry Animals followed, and gathered everyone back into the fold with an eclectic mix of chanty rock and pop and Welsh soul.
As the dance stages thumped on with sets from Jurassic 5, Mylo and 2 Many DJs (the DJ moniker of Soulwax's Dewaele brothers), Groove Armada took to the main stage determined to confound their reputation as chill-out kings, ending a night with a thundering show which mingled funk, ragga, beatbox, pop, rock and hip-hop.
Main men Tom Findlay and Andy Kato were bolstered by a fantastic backing band, and live, proved themselves to be one of the few missing links between the classic grooves of disco and the modern dance tune.
It was billed somewhat mysteriously as Ireland's first "boutique" festival, and in truth Electric Picnic did go some way to redefining the festival experience. Yet despite the promises, the beer and toilet queues proved as frustrating as always, while, at times, the compact layout of the site did lead to some dissonant sonic cross-pollination because of sound spill between stages.
Yet these were trifling criticisms that failed to dampen the street-party vibe. In the end, the gardens of Stradbally Hall proved to be the perfect setting for what turned out to be a far cry from your common or garden summer festival.
John Lane
LeAnn Rimes
Olympia Theatre, Dublin
She peddles a neat line in cinemascope country: music for wide open skies and surround sound home cinema systems. LeAnn Rimes' bandwagon stopped in town last Friday night and she aired her considerable back catalogue (for someone who's just 22) with the professionalism of a seasoned performer.
Rimes forged her reputation on the back of Patsy Cline's Blue and her zillion-selling How Do I Live?, the ultimate power ballad, borrowed by Trisha Yearwood for the soundtrack to the movie, Con Air. Rimes territory is the stuff of broken hearts, unrequited love and defiant survival, with hardly a trace of a big hat to be found lurking in the undergrowth.
She wears her Mississippi and Texan roots lightly, her west coast-influenced repertoire swinging seamlessly from the velveteen Looking Through Your Eyes to the no-holds barred melodrama of I Need You. With the bulk of the audience (from stalls to gods) lip-synching to much of her set list, Rimes rose to the mass adulation challenge with evident glee, and just a tincture of familarity: finding space not just for the dead certs like Last Thing On My Mind, but challenging her soft focus reputation with a rousing reading of Summertime, her unexpected tribute to an unlikely Rimes heroine, Janis Joplin.
Re-working Kris Kristofferson's Me And Bobby McGee as a rollicking hoe down might not work on paper, but Rimes managed to re-invent what has become a virtual national treasure.
She could so easily succumb to the temptation to wring every last ounce of emotion from her stock of power ballads, but Rimes possesses an appetite for more subtle connections with her audience, ones that allow her to raise the pulse levels past Vegas-time whenever she wants.
Of course she duly name-checked Ronan Keating and aired their modest hit, Last Thing On My Mind, before exiting the building. She plies a faultless line in country rock that tickles the sensibilities of hormonally turbo-charged young turks, pre-adolescent schoolgals and nuclear families in equal measure.
This visceral performance hinted that there's a lot more chutzpah beneath those blonde highlights than her CMTV videos would have us believe.
The hot money's on the gradual emergence of a singer who'll air a lot more of her own material, and maybe even tackle a few more Joplinesque samples before she hits her 30th birthday.
Siobhan Long
Catherine Bott and ensemble
Elmwood Hall, Belfast
Urrede, de la Torre, Pisador, Fernandez, Ponce, Encina and others
This concert was the last event in the BBC's Lagan goes Latin series, which consisted of six free Invitation Concerts given by the Ulster Orchestra in the Ulster Hall accompanied by six one-hour morning recitals in the more intimate Elmwood Hall.
This particular concert will, I understand, be broadcast in the BBC's Early Music Show slot, and of course it fits both strands; this 15th-century music, much of it by anonymous composers, reminds us of the great legacy of Spanish music which dates from the Renaissance period.
Soprano Catherine Bott, who also introduced the programme, was in her element, her warm but light soprano totally at home in both the language and the music and relishing its range of styles and moods. Many of the songs were satirical or light-hearted, but for me Juan Ponce's serious Como esta sola mi vida stood out. She was well supported by Pavlo Beznosiuk (medieval fiddle), Mark Levy (bass viol), Richard Sweeney (lute) and Stephen Henderson (percussion).
Catherine Bott evidently enjoyed performing a song for voice and percussion alone, but elsewhere, although the playing in itself was tasteful, the supple rhythms of the voice and the instrumental parts flourished best when not underpinned by the percussionist's beat.
Dermot Gault
Ulster Orchestra - Josep Caballé-Domenech
Ulster Hall, Belfast
Roberto Gerhard - Dances from Don Quixote. Villa-Lobos - Bachianas Brasilieras No 5. Ginastera - Estancia. Granados - Spanish Dances. Montsalvatge - Canciones Negras. Falla - Suite No 2 from El sombrero de tres picos.
Shortly before he died Roberto Gerhard said "I haven't 'arrived' yet - thank God". His quest took him from a folkloric Spanish idiom to an international modernism, and the four excerpts from Don Quixote played here achieve a personal fusion of both styles. Of all the musical depictions of this character, this is the one that best captures the subject's eccentricity.
Argentina's greatest composer Alberto Ginastera followed a similar path. The dances from his 1941 ballet Estancia are solidly traditional in style. Josep Caballé-Domenech obtained a punchy performance from the hard-working Ulster Orchestra.
The Montsalvatge songs, superficially more conventional, could still captivate even a listener becoming slightly sated with espagnolerie. Lamote de Grignon's orchestration of the Granados dances worked well in Oriental but did not do much for the famous Andaluza.
Dermot Gault
