Irish Times writers give their verdict...
Learning to Walk
East Cork Early Music Festival
For early music with a difference, visit the East Cork Early Music Festival this week.
With eight concerts in venues from Youghal to Cobh, it is the brainchild of American-born, top-notch viol player Sarah Cunningham, who is also the artistic director.
Steeped in historical performance practice both in concert and as a springboard for contemporary innovation, its performers include some of Ireland's and the world's best.
As Sarah Cunningham says in the printed programme, "any performance, even of written-down music, must have an element of improvisation . . . it must always spring from that one unique moment". From the 16th century to the 20th, Frescobaldi, Liszt and Busoni made similar comments.
Our modern obsession with precise reading has little basis in history. Those issues hit you in the eyes, as well as the ears, during the opening concert last Friday in the Stephen Pearce Gallery, Shanagarry.
Tara Brandel joined Sarah Cunningham to show the results of their involvement in improvisatory realisations of music and dance; and for viol duets Cunningham was joined by Sarah Groser.
The boundary between improvised and written music was almost imperceptible. When Tara Brandel was dancing, her fluidity and expressiveness shaped the music-making, whether there were written notes or not. And when she was not dancing, improvisation seemed undiminished, even in the passionate intellectualism of a precisely-notated duet by Matthew Locke.
That responsiveness between improvised music and movement, and vice versa, reached a pinnacle in Learning to Walk, which rightly was also the name of the concert. As Cunningham played a rising and then falling Dorian scale and Groser did her own hesitant or precise thing around it, Brandel's movements - now exploratory, now confident - had an immediacy which made you forget her discipline and historical awareness. Moving; and food for thought.
Continues until September 14th. For details telephone 021 485 5379 or visit www.melrosemusic.ie
- Martin Adams
Heather Nova
Vicar Street, Dublin
Heather Nova does not strike you as the kind of woman that bad things have happened to. She's 37, and looks late-20s, with an accent and demeanour that are beguiling and endearing.
She was born in Bermuda, and, for the most part, her songs, with titles like River of Life , Drinking In and One Day In June, amble along like a breeze on the beach.
She has a voice that is pure as the driven snow, and when she holds notes at length, which she seems to do effortlessly, there is none of the ubiquitous vibrato found in singers of a lesser calibre.
In fact, there is nothing wrong with Heather Nova at all; you could happily bring her home to even the most discerning mother.
Nova's music is perfect for American television, especially for those big gushy scenes where the main character is leaving and will never see the one they're meant to be with again.
It's nice enough, with a shade of emotion, but not so much so that it will overshadow the dialogue or the main actors. Fade up for the credits.
However, this is mainly the problem. Her songs quickly turn from nice and pleasant to predictable and bland.
The set blends seamlessly together, but writing the set-list can hardly be difficult with songs that sound so alike.
The few stand-out tracks were those that relied more on her vocal and guitar playing than her backing band.
Here, she played an acoustic set, but it is difficult to imagine any electrics giving the band the shock to the heart it needs to bring it to life.
In the encore she told us that she wrote Valley of Sound after "seeing Jeff Buckley play for the first time, which blew me away".
But everything that is good about Buckley's music is what is missing from Nova's; whereas Jeff Buckley's songs are edgy and gritty, Nova's are plain and sweet, whereas his are unpredictable and distinctive, hers are obvious and ordinary.
Her band don't put a foot or a note wrong, but you almost hope they would just to make something to stand out a little.
It is difficult to imagine anybody going home to write songs inspired by seeing Heather Nova play.
-Laurence Mackin
Ulster Orchestra - Takuo Yuasa
Ulster Hall, Belfast
Balakirev - Tamara. Prokofiev - Violin Concerto No 2. Rachmaninov -Symphony No 3.
A product of his final years in America, Rachmaninov's Third Symphony shows a composer aware of, and responding to, a changing musical world. His native romantic idiom vies throughout with a tougher and more acerbic style, and the ebullient finale is shot through with the Dies Irae theme which haunts so much of his later music.
After the first London performance, the composer Nicolai Medtner lay awake all night, afraid that his friend had succumbed to "modernism"; Yuasa's accomplished performance, however, emphasised the work's romanticism, shaping Rachmaninov's singing themes with an assured rubato and handling the textures with a careful attention to detail, although the virtuoso treatment of the work's final pages deprived the uncompromising ending of some of its punch. Only occasionally did one feel the want of a fuller string section.
On balance, this final concert of the series of BBC Invitation Concerts of Russian music was the most rewarding.
Balakirev's Tamara, an often gorgeously atmospheric work, has claim to be considered his masterpiece, and the intricate orchestral details which dissolve the distinction between thematic foreground and background were realised successfully.
In the Prokofiev concerto one sometimes wanted more tone from the French violinist Raphaël Oleg; in the middle of the finale, for instance, where Prokofiev wants the player to draw an intense tone quality from the violin's lowest string. But in the quieter passages he produced some of the most sweetly persuasive playing we have heard in this series.
-Dermot Gault
