It was Ramadan in 1998 when Youssou N'Dour first began to work on his Egypt album.
The music was intended for the ears of his friends and family and there was little thought given to pushing Egypt - with its songs in praise of various saints and sages who hold sway in Senegalese Sufism - at an audience beyond N'Dour's own Muslim community.
Whatever about the size and appetite of a Western market for an Islamic devotional album from one of world music's more favoured sons, the events of September 11th, 2001, made entertaining such a release a loaded, confusing, controversial affair.
Fast-forward to Ramadan 2004 and a venue in Dublin is captivated and bewitched by what they are hearing. Youssou N'Dour has been in town before, but he has never put on a spectacular like this. The album has been released and it's the Egypt show that has filled the room.
On the stage, the ranks of Fathay Salama's Egyptian orchestra are swinging away with gusto, their dramatic strings sending every note heavenwards under Salama's direction.
There are a few members of N'Dour's Dakar band onstage too - one wields a Mandika kora, adding an extravagant, extroverted tone to each track; another mans a percussion kit, adding pace and energy to the proceedings.
If that's a sight and sound to please the senses of the audience, one can only imagine N'Dour's own pleasure at how events have transpired.
The album that he had intended to be another private release (one of many destined solely for Senegal) has not just found eager listeners elsewhere, but it has re-established N'Dour's own credentials and reignited his career.
Gone - perhaps temporarily but in all likelihood forever - are any attempts at watering down his music and beliefs to score another Seven Seconds. That policy didn't work. What works, as 2002's Nothing In Vain album, and especially Egypt show, is N'Dour following his own star.
The giddy, euphoric swell of Touba-Daru Slaam, a show-stopper both on record and live, and the simple, humble tones of Bamba The Poet show that these magnificent, heart-warming, celestial songs can work on several levels.
The music soothes and the spirit soars. While few here can translate N'Dour's lyrics from Wolof, there's no doubting his personal investment in these songs of love and devotion. As he explains at an early stage in the evening, his Islam is a simple, peaceful religion and these songs pay tribute to the teachers who've influences this outlook.
In the midst of the devotional tones, the orchestral splendour and the hushed expectation of the room, it's N'Dour's voice that cuts to the chase every time. Rich, evocative, poetic and authoritative. N'Dour provides the necessary colour and shade throughout.
Be it Shukran Bamba or Baay Niasse, the passion that makes this a night out like no other this year comes from the tall man pacing the stage singing simple, powerful songs of praise. Truly, a night to remember. - Jim Carroll
Opera Scenes, Wexford Festival Opera
Ravel - L'Heure espagnole
Rossini - Il viaggio a Reims
It's the proverbial choice between seeing the glass either half-full or half-empty. Wexford's Opera Scenes (operas reduced to 90-minute matinees with piano accompaniment and a cast of chorus-members from the main evening productions) do enough for some, too little for others.
In the case of Ravel's farce-like one-acter L'Heure espagnole, the former response came easily with music director John Shea's fine handling at the piano. This left the way clear to enjoy all that was good in an entertaining production that ranks among director John McKeown's best work in Ireland to date.
The energetic and credible young cast seemed entirely at home in Ravel's madcap sex-comedy about a wife entertaining her lovers during the one hour in the week when her clockmaker husband must go out and attend to the municipal clocks.
The wife was played with delightfully ever-diminishing self-composure by Polish mezzo Agata Bienkowska as she juggled the lovers, who meanwhile hid from each other and the husband by climbing into grandfather clocks.
The clocks - sometimes containing lovers - were carried effortlessly upstairs and down by the obliging muleteer, Ramiro, sung by tall, well-built Italian tenor Riccardo Massi in a performance that was a scene-stealing triumph despite the obvious underdevelopment of his voice.
A relative newcomer to singing who has been funding lessons by working as a stuntman in films such as Gangs of New York and Gladiator, Massi was making his operatic début in a principal role.
It was, however, over-ambitious to cast him also in Rossini. Otherwise, director Roberto Recchia's contemporary, irreverent, and sometimes Monty Pythonesque take on Il viaggio a Reims works well.
A large cast of 13 take it in turns to perform demanding solos, duets and grand ensembles as hotel guests and staff waiting to go to Rheims for the coronation of Charles X. In the end, the king, in whose honour Rossini composed the piece, gets a pie in the face.
Amidst all the hilarity, funny surtitles, anachronistic musical insertions and send-ups - notably of national anthems and songs, and of the power of music to soothe the soul - there was some fine Rossini singing, appreciable even in the dead acoustic of the Dún Mhuire Theatre with its sound-killing curtains. The best came from Georgian soprano Elizaveta Martirosyan (as Corinna) and Italian bass Alessandro Svab (as Don Profundo).
Honourable mentions go also to Irish soprano Kim Sheehan (in Absolutely Fabulous mode as the Contessa), and clear-voiced newcomer, British tenor Sean Clayton (as Cavalier Belfiore). Here too, the piano, courtesy of music director Robert Pechanec, was a successful substitute for orchestra. - Michael Dungan
Gondole, Pizza e Mandolini, Wexford Festival Opera
Elizaveta Martirosyan (soprano), Elizabeth Batton (mezzo soprano), Eric Shaw (tenor), and Alessandro Svab (bass), accompanied by Rosetta Cucchi.
This was no ordinary song recital. The singers moved around a stage setting in the Dun Mhuire Theatre that represented the departure lounge of Wexford International Airport.
Departure, or rather, non-departure announcements were made from time to time in a heavy foreign accent, and the flight information screen usefully doubled as a display for the translations of most of the sung texts.
The range of repertoire, all with Italian associations, was wide - from Mendelssohn and Wolf to Tchaikovsky and Ravel, with the lion's share going to Hahn and Wolf-Ferrari - and included much that was rare.
Yet, having gone to the trouble of staging the recital, director Roberto Recchia allowed his singers to perform from the music. And the piano was placed on the floor of the theatre, creating a physical separation from the voices that can't have made anyone's task any the easier, and certainly did the music no favours.
The singing, sadly, was mostly of a dull and dutiful sort, as if the singers were carrying out a set assignment rather than engaged in any form of expressive communication.
Svab rose above the norm in his quite stylish handling of Wolf-Ferrari's E giacché vedo qui l'alba apparire, and Martirosyan and Shaw were at their best when paired in Hahn's Che pecà!
Saturday afternoon's baroque programme, given by the conductorless Cracow Philharmonic Chamber Soloists at Rowe Street Church, was altogether more rewarding.
The music-making didn't always have an ideal sharpness of outline nor did it give the sense of digging much beneath the surface of the music. But the playing was neat, and the cautious dynamics secured a clarity that is unusual in this venue.
The soloist in Vivaldi's Lute Concerto, RV93, was the fluent young Polish guitarist Andrzej Heimowski, whose performance was slightly marred by the colouration of his amplification equipment.
The orchestra's leader, Wieslaw Kwasny, was joined by oboist Pawel Nyklewicz in a sturdy performance of Bach's Concerto for Oboe and Violin. And the two vocal soloists, Elizaveta Martirosyan and mezzo soprano Agata Bienkowska, worked best in duet in the rather low-key performance of Pergolesi's Stabat Mater. - Michael Dervan
