Irish Times critics give their verdicts...
The Raveonettes
Whelan's, Dublin
By Peter Crawley
Their name emblazoned across the stage in rakish B-movie font, their trendy frames adorned with studs and leather and their three-chord rock-'n'-roll songs buzzing like the engine of a Triumph Thunderbird, The Raveonettes are as much in thrall to 1950s Americana as Marlon Brando's rebel in The Wild One.
Yet another example of studied retro (join the black rebel motorcycle club), achingly hip Danish duo Sune Rose Wagner (guitar, vocals) and Sharin Foo (bass, vocals) are so much the genuine rock/novelty act norm that it doesn't take an uncomprehending square to ask: what are you rebelling against? With matching "his and hers" vacant stares, the angular Wagner and the sultry Foo pound out breakneck scuzz rock and surf tunes, borrowing equally from The Ronettes, The Shangri-Las and The Jesus and Mary Chain. At barely two minutes, Do You Believe Her?, with its arm-slicing guitar riffs and discrete samples, is a superb way to open a gig.
A hot-rod confrontation with their hipper-than-thou audience suitably resembles a game of chicken. The music speeds daringly towards us, howling through vortices of feedback, but fashion forbids emotional response - who will flinch first? They do. It may be a great trick, but musically The Raveonettes are still a one-trick pony. Each song religiously begins with either B flat minor or B flat major. This is a bit like wearing the same underwear every day - comfortingly regular, but soon people will notice.
Chain Gang of Love, That Great Love Sound, Love Can Destroy Everything and Cops on our Tail best express their ascetism and aestheticism - theirs, you see, is a crime of passion. But substance and style choke under increasingly monotonous bluster.
Brando had exactly the same problem with The Wild One: "We wanted to explain the psychology of the hipster," he complained after filming, "but all we did was show the violence."
McGahon, O'Reilly, Tinney/ Hugo Wolf Festival
Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin
By Douglas Sealy
The quality of the poetry in Spanish Songbook, translated from the Spanish by Geibel and Heyse, is not as high as that of the Mörike and Goethe songbooks, and this seems to have inspired Hugo Wolf to a greater freedom of approach in his treatment of the texts.
Short phrases or motifs, distillations of a song's central inspiration, are repeated and varied, and combined in the piano part in ways that seem dictated by purely musical considerations and yet are inseparable from the melodies set to the texts. Hugh Tinney's exceptionally clear and sympathetic playing ensured that voice and piano were never at odds but always an enhancement of each other.
In the first song of this recital, Ach, wie lang die Seele schlummert (Ah, how long the soul slumbers), Philip O'Reilly sang with such persuasive solemnity and emotional power that it was almost the equal of the next song, Herr, was trägst der Boden hier (Lord, what does the earth bear, here), probably the best-known and most intense work in the spiritual section of Spanish Songbook.
Colette McGahon, in Mühvoll komm' ich und beladen (Full of cares I come and heavily laden), reached similar heights, especially in its climactic appeal to the saviour, "O nimm mich an, du Hort der Gnaden" ("O take me in, you haven of mercies"). In the secular songs McGahon lightened her approach to express the ups and downs of love affairs in which despair can be an aspect of flirtatiousness, and where setbacks seem only temporary, thanks to the energy of the music.
Philip O'Reilly's restrained singing always suggested a power held in reserve and added to the profundity of the feeling, whether the lover was in challenging mood or looked to death to solve his woes.
Tinney, RTÉCO/Wagner
Mahony Hall, The Helix, Dublin
By Michael Dervan
Divertimento for Strings - Bartók. Piano Concerto No 1 - Liszt. Dance Suite - Bartók. Dances of Galánta - Kodály
'A Tale of Four Cities', the RTÉ Concert Orchestra's début series under its new principal conductor, Laurent Wagner, ended with a programme focusing on Budapest.
From an orchestral point of view, the strongest performances were of the opening and closing works. Bartók's Divertimento, commissioned by the wealthy patron and conductor, Paul Sacher (who also provided a chalet in Switzerland for the composer to work in), was written in 15 days in August 1939 and premièred in Basel the following June. "Somehow," wrote Bartók while composing the work, "I feel like an old-time musician summoned as the guest of a Maecenas."
The tuneful lightness of the outer movements is fully in keeping with the title, while the slow central movement contains deeper rumblings - Bartók was greatly exercised by the prospects for a Europe inexorably headed into war. Laurent Wagner's approach was to take the music at face value, both in its carefree moods and its darker shadings.
Kodály's Dances of Galánta were written for the 50th anniversary of the Budapest Philharmonic Society in 1933. They celebrate the composer's first experience of orchestral music - a gypsy orchestra heard in the town of Galánta - through sparkling and sprightly treatments of tunes collected and published in Vienna around 1800. Wagner and his players delivered these most attractive dances with infectious zest.
Bartók's Dance Suite was commissioned in 1923 to mark the 50th anniversary of the merging of the cities of Buda and Pest into the modern Hungarian capital, Budapest. It is a work of what the composer called "imaginary folk music", all original material but so imbued with folk spirit that its tunes could be taken for actual folk music. The performance here was less successful, with the string section inadequate in numbers to balance the weight of the heavier brass, and too many moments of scrappiness creeping into the string playing.
There were also some uncomfortable moments in the accompaniment of the evening's only excursion into the 19th century for Liszt's Piano Concerto No 1, a work premièred at Weimar in 1855 with the composer as soloist and no less a figure than Berlioz conducting. But soloist Hugh Tinney was on fine form, playing with his familiar, classically controlled fire.
