Douglas Sealy reviews a performance by soprano Lynda Lee and pianist Jimmy Vaughan, while Michael Dervan enjoys a performance by pianist Andrew Larkin.
Lynda Lee & Jimmy Vaughan, Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin
Douglas Sealy
Hugo Wolf often emphasised that only a small and intimate surrounding was really appropriate for a performance of his songs. The Hugh Lane Gallery is not large but neither is it intimate, so performers have to strive for a delicate balance between a satisfying projection of the sound and the preservation of a sense of privacy in communication.
In the 17 settings of Mörike presented by the soprano Lynda Lee and the pianist Jimmy Vaughan as part of the festival of Wolf's songs, the composer continually asks for softness but failed to get it more often than not. For example, Wolf's evocation of the delicate sounds of an Aeolian harp (An Eine Aeolsharfe), whose strings vibrate only when the wind breathes on them, needs the utmost delicacy from voice and piano, so that when the wind suddenly becomes stronger (heftiger) the increase in volume rouses a "sweet terror" in the listener, after which the music should fade until it is almost inaudible.
On this occasion, however, there was so much passion that the delicacy was neglected. Singer and pianist were very much in rapport, so as music the performances gave great pleasure, but with a composer who sought to convey every nuance of a chosen poem the text must control the expression, being in no way subservient to it.
These were generous, large-scale performances, and such songs as the boisterous Lied Von Winde (Song of the Wind), Er Ist's (Spring is here), the fantastic fairy tale of Nixe Binsefuss (The Nixie Reedfoot) and the ironical vignette of the lovelorn gardener, Der Gärtner (The gardener), were most appealing in their eloquent brilliance.
Andrew Larkin, John Field Room, Dublin
Michael Dervan
Out Of Doors Suite - Bartók. Sonata in C minor Op 111 - Beethoven. In A Thousand Valleys Far And Wide - Philip Martin. Four Pieces Op 119 - Brahms. Sonata No 7 - Prokofiev.
The Dublin pianist Andrew Larkin, winner of many prizes at the Siemens Feis Ceoil, was this year's winner of the Mabel Swainson Pianoforte Award, which brought him this recital at the John Field Room.
Larkin, who studies with John O'Conor at the Royal Irish Academy of Music, came across as a player with little fear. His programme alone would tell you that.
And although, as is the wont of so many young players, the demands of his chosen works were at times greater than his fingers could comfortably manage, he kept himself clearly focused on the sweep and trajectory he had in mind for the music.
His playing suggested he likes the growl and bite that the modern concert grand so readily provides. He seemed to enjoy digging into left-hand octaves and heavy chordal writing, and, undaunted by musical challenges, he showed himself willing to launch at quick movements (the first movement of Beethoven's Sonata in C minor, Op 111, the outer movements of Prokofiev's Seventh) at a fair old lick.
The most obvious conceptual limitations in his playing quickly identified themselves. He treated the stresses in the percussive With Drums And Pipes that opens Bartók's Out Of Doors as purely accentual, without serious reference to harmonic weight or gradation of dissonance.
Harmonic thinking generally seemed low in his list of priorities, a serious drawback in Beethoven and Brahms, and also in the cryptic first movement of Prokofiev's Seventh Sonata, where, without a grasp of the harmonic scheme of things, much of the writing can seem rather emptily agitated.
At times it appeared that his thinking was primarily sequential, and aimed largely at sustaining momentum while dealing with the problems presented to fingers and hands, rather than engaging more directly with the knottier musical issues embedded in the patterns of notes.
It was in parts of Philip Martin's In A Thousand Valleys Far And Wide and in the notorious toccata that closes the Prokofiev sonata that music and musician struck the most rewarding balance.
