Ray Comiskey investigates the ESB Dublin Jazz Festival, while Michael Dervan visits Bantry's West Cork Chamber Music Festival.
ESB Dublin Jazz Festival
Various venues
By Ray Comiskey
The dominant characteristics of the closing days of this year's festival were diversity and quality, rather than quantity. In its range, the programme was evidence that the Improvised Music Company's programme director, Gerry Godley, worked some minor miracles on what must have been the tightest of budgets.
Arguably the double bass sextet, Orchestre de Contrabasses, was diversity pushed to idiosyncrasy, but there was much to savour over the last three days - a specially commissioned work by Ronan Guilfoyle, Simulacrum, given its première in Meeting House Square, and two splendid concerts in Vicar Street, which featured music from Vietnam, the US, Brazil and the Cape Verde Islands.
Probably the finest single concert of these was Saturday night's visit of the festival headliners, the Dave Douglas Quintet from the US and the Franco-Vietnamese Dragonfly, a sextet led by guitarist Nguyên Lê and singer Houng Thanh. The evening provided a dramatic contrast in styles: Dragonfly was a beautiful blend of jazz and Vietnamese folk music, reflective and gentle, but with an unmistakeable underlying strength of conception, while the Quintet unveiled some bristlingly aggressive jazz that bore the leader's uncompromising stamp.
Although the group, with composer Douglas on trumpet, Seamus Blake (tenor), Uri Caine (Fender Rhodes), James Genus (bass) and Clarence Penn (drums), opened somewhat tentatively, the reason was soon clear; much of the repertoire was new. The quintet, however, settled as the concert progressed, with remarkable soloing by Douglas, Blake and Caine, climaxed by an incredibly moving Just Let Me Say This, Douglas's remembrance of the victims of violence throughout the world.
In drawing its material from Vietnamese folk song and its expressive forces from the idioms of that source, from jazz and from rock, Dragonfly produced an engaging synthesis, compellingly melodic and impressively musical in its combination of voice, guitar, bass, electronics and ethnic instruments.
Equally impressive was the première of Ronan Guilfoyle's Simulacrum, an eight-part composition using the classical string trio of violin, viola and cello, with the jazz trio set up of guitar, bass and drums. And although the composer acknowledged influences as disparate as Bartók, Ornette Coleman and Berber music in his programme note, the extended result was manifestly by the same single hand, with no sense of a musical hodge-podge.
It also contained some of the finest string writing yet heard from Guilfoyle, rich and balanced, full of interest and surprise, with players to match in three exponents of these classical instruments who are also outstanding improvisers - Ernst Reijseger, Tanya Kalmanovitch and Dominique Pifarély. The combination was gloriously effective and, with drummer Sean Carpio negotiating the score brilliantly and Guilfoyle in notable form as a soloist, the results were often compelling. Only the guitar of Max Holtne seemed under-used in the mixture.
Sunday night's closing concert in Vicar Street was, again, a study in contrasts, although not as extreme as that between the Douglas Quintet and Dragonfly. Singer/
guitarist Teofilo Chantre opened with a quintet playing songs from the Cape Verdean Islands, nostalgic, exile pieces for the most part, tinged with melancholy. He had a tight, capable band, very relaxed, with an instrumentation that included accordion and a stunning violinist, Kim Dan Le Oc Mach, who, despite the name, sounded totally at home in the idiom.
Their music was pleasant, undemanding stuff, completely eclipsed by what followed.
Brazilian singer/composer/guitarist Joyce emerged with her own sextet and electrified the audience with a contemporary take on bossa nova. The group was propulsive and driving, grooving with that understated power that seems to be second nature to Brazilian musicians, while Joyce again showed what an amazing presence she has as a performer. And for all its exuberance, the music was subtle, sophisticated and full of the unexpected. Just like the festival.
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West Cork Chamber Music Festival
Bantry, Co Cork
By Michael Dervan
The Third Violin Sonata of George Enescu dates from 1926 and is one of the most evocative works in the violin and piano repertory. The piece is described on its title page as being "dans le caractére populaire roumain". And it is exactly that - Romanian character - that the composer chose to invest it with, rather than quotations of actual Romanian folk music.
The printed music, particularly the violin part, is littered with an unusual number of detailed markings, yet the spirit that comes out of it is that of improvisation. "I know of no other work more painstakingly edited or planned," remarked Enescu's pupil, Yehudi Menuhin. "It is correct to say that it is quite sufficient to follow the score for one to interpret the work." It helps, of course, to have musicians who understand the idiom, as Patricia Kopatchinskaja (above right) and Hugh Tinney, the duo who played the sonata at the West Cork Chamber Music Festival on Thursday, clearly do.
Kopatchinskaja is as free-spirited a violinist as you could imagine. She makes her instrument sing, weep, dance, cajole, flirt. She has an astonishing command of nuance, and doesn't need to shift dynamic gear to run the gamut of emotional expression. She plays the violin not really as an instrument, but as an extension of herself. And, coming as she does from modern-day Moldova, she has long been exposed to the very music Enescu was re-fabricating in such minute detail. Tinney was a patient and painstaking partner, weaving a clear background for Kopatchinskaja's manoeuverings, wispy, firm or jaunty, as the composer requested.
The duo also played the early Violin Sonata by Karol Szymanowski, the leading Polish composer of the early 20th century. Here, Kopatchinskaja's assertiveness sounded like an attempt to raise the music above its actual level. It's not one of the composer's best works, and the effect in performance was to weaken rather than strengthen it.
Kevin Volans's describes his new Piano Trio, a festival commission premièred by the Osiris Trio, as a work which explores the tensions between the lyrical or narrative and the abstract in music. But on a first hearing the piece seemed to glorify process over content and, unlike the best of his work, didn't provide the essential spark to draw the listener in.
Volans's music is much influenced by minimalist practices, as is that of Poland's Henryk Górecki, whose Second Quartet (Quasi una fantasia) featured in the late-night concert by the Silesian Quartet. There's a strongly off-the-shelf quality to the material of this piece which atmospheric performance can do a lot to shore up. But, subjected to so much repetition, and mostly polarised into loud agitation and quiet stillness, the effect is of threadbare slogans repeated ad nauseam. Fauré's First Piano Quintet (Artur Pizarro with the Petersen Quartet) presents not totally dissimilar issues. This is music with the softest of imprints, threatening to lapse into everyday but always revealing subtly bleached colours and nuances on closer inspection.
Delicate nuancing was one of the joys of Pascal Moraguès's performance of the Mozart Clarinet Quintet with the RTÉ Vanbrugh Quartet. There was a slow-motion effect in his playing, nothing to do with the actual speed, as if he had found time to shape and finesse his phrasing in a way that eludes other players. The day opened with a rehabilitation of the harp, in a song recital that included George Crumb's wittily colourful Federico's Little Songs for Children (Charlotte Riedijk, soprano, Nancy Ruffer, flutes, and Godelieve Schrama, harp) and Eight Folksongs for voice and harp, idiomatically set by Benjamin Britten.
Saturday's late-night performance of Schnittke's Piano Quintet was clearly conceived as the climax of the day's musical activity, and so it turned out to be.
The composer's widow, Irina, joined the RTÉ Vanbrugh Quartet, and showed theextraordinary focus and tenacity which have been such a feature of all her performances at the festival.
On the one hand, there was something bald and simple about her playing. These are the notes, this is how it goes, she seemed to be saying. There was not much in the way of conventional emoting, no nuancing of individual notes, no glosses, no commentary. Yet, on the other hand, everything was highly expressive. She phrased with rigour and weighed and voiced chords with musical insight and an apparent dispassion that lifted her music-making well beyond the realm of the personal.
The personal in the Piano Quintet, a musical response to the death of the composer's mother, is anyhow pretty unmissable. There is an obsessive anguish expressed in much clashing of quarter-tones - that's ultimately absorbed, after five movements, into an equally obsessive, lightly-lilting piano refrain that, in this performance, remained impressively unsweetened. The Vanbrughs rose to the occasion, and the audience was vociferous in its acclaim.
The main evening concert included Mozart's Kegelstatt Trio in a muted performance by Pascal Moraguès (clarinet), Danilo Rossi (viola) and Artur Pizarro (piano).
Pizarro was back at the piano, with Patricia Kopatchinskaja (violin), Zoltán Gal (viola) and Alexander Ivashkin (cello) for a Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde performance of Brahms's C minor Piano Quartet, with Kopatchinskaja often inhabiting an hysterical zone all her own - fabulous fiddling serving an interpretative approach that was really quite strange. Ivashkin was joined by accordionist Dermot Dunne in Sofia Gubaidulina's In Croce, a work that, with broad gestures, effectively casts the two instruments in highly-contrasting roles.
The day opened with a harp recital by Godelieve Schrama, in none-too sharp-sounding arrangements of keyboard sonatas by Scarlatti and Soler. Britten's Suite, Op. 83, and Berio's Sequenza II showed the wisdom of including original music by 20th-century masters. But sadly, the two major harp showpieces, by Parish-Alvars and Renié went awry, with extraordinary memory lapses and even more extraordinary lapses in professional decorum in the handling of them.
The Petersen Quartet's afternoon programme offered Beethoven (a clean performance of the Quartet in A, Op. 18 No. 5, that somehow seemed almost perfunctory), Krenek (the rather anonymous-sounding Five Short Pieces of 1948 by this prolific and stylistically many-faceted composer), and Shostakovich (a satisfying performance of the Fourth Quartet, written in the wake of the official condemnation of 1948).
Friday featured French flautist Mathieu Dufour (currently first flute of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra) in easy partnership with Irish pianist Finghin Collins. They offered flute favourites by Fauré, Roussel, Messiaen and Prokofiev in performances that were both warm-hearted and sharply etched.
