Michael Dervan reviews the RTE National Symphony Orcestra at the National Concert Hall and Peter Crawley reviews Lo'Jo at Crawdaddy in Dublin.
RTÉ NSO/Markson NCH, Dublin
Gerald Barry - The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant
Gerald Barry's The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant is a bullet train of an opera. In a way, it had to be. The composer took the unusual decision of setting the entire text of Rainer Werner Fassbinder's original play.
That's a lot of words, even for a composer as renowned for the driven energy of his style as Barry is.
Barry has never been a man shy of tackling self-imposed challenges head on, and the new opera, which was given its concert premiere by the RTÉ NSO on Friday, is carried along with extraordinary force, from its horn-led opening, like the school-ground chanting of a children's taunt, to its shattering conclusion.
Barry is in many ways the unlikeliest of opera composers.
In the past he hasn't so much set texts, as exploded and decomposed them, treating them to the equivalent of the physical contortions and distortions that only cartoon characters can be subjected too.
Although in Petra he avoids the extremes of earlier works, the demands on the voices are often relentless.
The words fly by at speeds which often seem dizzying, and the conventions of tailoring orchestral mass to vocal means are regularly flouted.
The effect is not what you might expect, at least not for a listener at a concert performance with the printed libretto to hand.
It's as if Barry has not so much set the text - with all that implies of marrying music and word - as presented it in a context so fraught and turbulent that it stands somewhat apart, highlighted in a way that's neutral enough to allow it to remain entirely itself.
The music can lock itself into momentary loops, interject rude rasps between words, enforce momentary silences, pound out clusters in imitation of fistfuls of notes on a keyboard, or rocket and swirl with firework-like elaboration.
Yet it somehow manages to leave the integrity of the text unchallenged.
And the combination of the two is at once wickedly black, comic and rich in pathos.
The opera has six characters, all female, the twice-married, now divorced fashion designer Petra, her mother Valerie, her daughter Gabriele, her friend Sidonie, her lover Karin, and her personal secretary Marlene.
Only five appeared on the platform on Friday.
The absent character was Marlene, a willing slave to Petra, who never speaks, although Barry's music clearly suggests dark depths in her relationship with Petra, just as it typically goes into forbidding regions for the music from the record player specified by the text (the Platters, the Walker Brothers).
Petra is a woman of see-sawing emotions, who blends naivety and experience with a confusion which is not helped by her booziness.
Vocally, she is called upon to carry the opera, and Rayanne Dupuis did this with apparently unflagging energy, although there were moments when the voice was simply swallowed up by the orchestra.
Her nemesis is young Karin (the agile Mary Plazas), a bluntly exploitative, two-timing go-getter.
The voices of concern and reason are represented by Sidonie (the firm-toned Stephanie Marshall) and Valerie (a rather under-powered Deirdre Cooling-Nolan), and there's an injection of innocence and clarity from Gabriele (the sharp and sparkling Sylvia O'Brien, in devastatingly accurate-sounding vocal form).
Friday's performance was an exhilarating experience, in which conductor Gerhard Markson unleashed the music's power with superb control, and had his players delivering of their finest from beginning to end.
And yet it was also one which made it impossible to imagine what the opera might seem like when it receives its stage premiere at the English National Opera next September.
Then there will be a Marlene on stage, and the comprehensibility of the text will have to be addressed in a house which has traditionally set up a stall against the use of surtitles. Michael Dervan
Lo'Jo at Crawdaddy, Dublin
Swallowing up everything from the riotous beats of Rio de Janeiro's favelas to folk tunes performed by African griots, the "world music" section of your record shop is so nebulously defined the category can seem meaningless.
But trust the phenomenal and globetrotting sound of the Angers-based sextet, Lo'Jo, to finally make some sense of it.
For over 20 years the wild expanse of this group's talent has accommodated seemingly immiscible influences.
In a sympathetically adventurous Crawdaddy, pan-cultural songs spun a subtle tapestry from French chansons and Arabic harmonies to the screech of gypsy violins, from funk rhythms to contemporary dance beats.
It felt - for a moment - that all cultural friction would soften with the right harmony.
This cynic-busting idealism is testament not only to the instrumental skills of the musicians, but also to Lo'Jo's ability to facilitate seemingly impossible unions.
This is the band, after all, which organised The Festival of the Desert and drew Malian musicians, Tuareg tribesmen and a smattering of western groups to a remote stretch of the
Sahara.
Such journeys have clearly enriched their perspective, with tremendous violinist Richard Bourreau equally compelling when scratching a frenetic melody from the imzad, an onion-shaped Saharan fiddle played with something like an archer's bow.
Meanwhile French-Algerian sisters Nadia and Yamina Nid el Mourid deliver lockstep, lilting Maghrebi harmonies to relieve the parched, Tom Waitsian verses of slouching singer/keyboardist Denis Péan.
In other hands the limpid beats of Petit Homme, the cabaret jazz of Le Piano or the psychedelic chatter of Cinq Cauris Ocre would make for an indigestible gallimaufry.
But to Lo'Jo this is second nature.
As Yamina finally whirls through a ferocious dance while an intoxicating number swells around us, world music seems to agree upon a common language.
In the afterglow of their unifying performance, one wonders what Lo'Jo could do for the European constitution.
But that may be the fusion talking. Peter Crawley
