Michael Dervan reports on the West Cork Chamber Music Festival inBantry, Co Cork, while Kevin Courtney heard Nina Nastasia in The Village in Dublin.
West Cork Chamber Music Festival
Bantry, Co Cork
By Michael Dervan
Speaker's Corner, says the composer Deirdre Gribbin of her new piano quintet, commissioned for West Cork Chamber Music Festival, is a piece she has long wanted to write. The idea started when she encountered Speaker's Corner, that unique platform in Hyde Park, London, where ideas serious and cranky can be addressed by anyone to whatever audience can be tempted to listen.
The musical possibilities of exchange and resistance are clear, and, says Gribbin, she endeavoured to give each of the musicians their own soapboxes. The effect in its premiere by Joanna MacGregor and the RTÉ Vanbrugh Quartet was as mixed as you might expect at Speaker's Corner.
The raw material didn't always sound fully worthy of the prominence it was seeking, although the moments when things stood out, particularly when communal agreement had been reached, were all the more impressive for the nature of their surroundings.
In their early years in Ireland, the Vanbrugh's playing of new music was one of the quartet's greatest strengths. They don't always sound comfortable in contemporary music these days, and there was a nervy quality to this performance, which didn't really seem to be to the music's advantage.
Being programmed after Alfred Schnittke's First Cello Sonata was certainly no advantage. This is one of Schnittke's works in which the legacy of Shostakovich is most clearly evident, but that legacy is intensified in its relentlessness and blacker-than-blackness. At least that's how it sounded in the performance by Alexander Ivashkin, with the composer's widow, Irina, at the piano. The duo's playing had a compelling magnetism that was musically irresistible.
Earlier in the day, the Osiris Trio from the Netherlands had played piano trios by Beethoven (Op 11) and Smetana with results that somehow seemed less than the sum of the parts.
Of the group's individual strengths there was no doubt, but on this occasion their collective failure to establish clarity of foreground and background was wearing on the ear.
The festival is commemorating the 70th birthdays of two leading Polish composers, Henryk Górecki and Krzysztof Penderecki. Sunday was Penderecki's turn, and the Silesian String Quartet gave sharp performances of the two short quartets he wrote in the 1960s in the sonically adventurous, effects-laden, avant-garde style he espoused before he discovered the attractions of old-fashioned romanticism.
The group's opening performance of Beethoven (the Quartet in F minor, Op 95) seemed a little unsettled, but their handling of Shostakovich's Quartet No 11 had much more eloquence.
The German baritone Christian Gerhaher sang Schumann's Dichterliebe with unfailing musical composure and consistent vocal beauty, although his partner at the piano, Gerold Huber, took an altogether fussier and more intrusive approach. This was not the most stirring of Dichterliebes, but its reserved poignancy had an attraction all its own.
The day closed with Garth Knox in György Ligeti's daunting sonata for solo viola. It's cast in six dance-related movements and ends with a chaconne, making an obvious connection to Bach. But the way Ligeti throws focused challenges at the performer, it's more like a series of études, a string player's equivalent of the piano studies, which are now Ligeti's most-played pieces.
It would be a distortion to say Knox played it with ease. But he played it with persuasive gumption and sure grasp - as well he might, as he was the first to play any of it in public, and studied it with the composer.
Nina Nastasia
The Village, Dublin
By Kevin Courtney
Her name suggests Berlin cabaret, and onstage she resembles a femme fatale, but the New Yorker is made of gentler, more ethereal stuff. This was her first gig in Ireland, and such was the power of her folk-noir tales that we hope it won't be her last. Next time, though, she might consider cutting her support acts to just one or two. Before we could settle into Nastasia's weighty American gothic sounds, we had to cock an ear to three bizarre one-man bands.
Neosupervital is a local chap who writes pleasantly offbeat tunes using a drum machine and a guitar that sounds like a keyboard. With unkempt blond hair and 1970s shades, he could pass for Har Mar Superstar's Irish cousin, but luckily he keeps his clothes on, including the T-shirt on which he has printed his set list.
Nothing can prepare you for the Lonesome Organist, who simultaneously plays drums and keyboards, all the time yodelling his doo-wop blues and stopping now and then for a quick tap-dance routine. Jeremy Jacobsen (for that is his real name) plays a mean organ, his fingers dancing effortlessly through some of the funkiest lines this side of Booker T.
Bob Log III, in comparison, is a one-trick pony, and it doesn't take long for his slide guitar to wear down our patience. Log sports an Evel Kneivel suit and motorcycle helmet with a telephone receiver fused to the visor, making it impossible to see his face or decipher the lyrics of his songs.
When Nastasia and her band finally take the stage, the mood switches to sombre reflection, and as the cellos, violins, accordions, double bass and drums swell up behind her acoustic guitar, you can almost feel yourself being lifted on a cushion of sound. Like Tindersticks or The Bad Seeds, Nastasia's band displays the kind of craftsmanship that allows a song to breathe and open out. Nastasia's voice glides beautifully above the swirl. Worth the wait.
