Reviews of Pink, Kelleherat the NCH, DeVotchKaat Crawdaddy and Philip Cartyat the NCH

Pink, Kelleher

NCH, Dublin

The Last Rose of Summer– songs by Stanford, Schubert, Quilter, Hahn, Alma Mahler, Chaminade, Brahms, Rooney.

This programme showed good practice in assembling a sequence of contrasted songs. They were carefully arranged into groups defined by style, language and purpose so that, on the whole, no group was overshadowed by those surrounding it.

Elizabeth Pink’s contralto voice was always pleasant to listen to. Her ability to create dark sonority was especially effective in three songs by Alma Mahler; and, although the range of vocal colour was not obviously wide, she was good at creating contrasts that were both subtle and apt.

One of her particular strengths is her understanding of song as an intensified mode of poetry. The vocal lines were flexibly shaped, words led, and the music’s rhythmic patterns were replete with subtle lengthening and shortening. In all this, she and pianist Deborah Kelleher were an engaging partnership – reliable, sensitive and unanimous.

Sometimes that high purpose might have been assisted by a bit more risk-taking. In Chaminade's Slavic Song, for example, the bouts of fractured dance rhythm were taken seriously. Although the poem is serious – a friend is lost, and "a serpent cuts at my heart" – that quality would not have been damaged if the dance-like passages had been more abandoned. Rather, it might have intensified the ironic and slightly manic aspects of an impeccable song.

Both these musicians work at the Royal Irish Academy of Music. So it was a neat touch to end with a setting of Moore's The Last Rose of Summerin which the accompaniment was by a former counterpoint teacher at the RIAM, Hubert Rooney. It brought together two sides of this consistently engaging recital – the artless simplicity of the parlour song and, in Rooney's piano writing, the knowing skill of the art song. MARTIN ADAMS

DeVotchKa

Crawdaddy, Dublin

If you crave a mix of Gypsy punk, Greek dance, Slavic rhythms, Mexican mariachi and oddball indie, then look no further than Denver, Colorado, where the quartet known as DeVotchKa have make it OK to polka and cool to klezmer. Led by the perma-stubbled Nick Urata, who looks like a Greek restaurant owner on his night off, DeVotchKa perform their rootsy music with a distinct post-rock sensibility, using accordion, violin, bouzouki, sousaphone, double bass, trumpet and theremin to whip up their mad concoction of sound. World music? It may as well be from another planet.

DeVotchKa started out as backing musicians for burlesque dancers. Their breakthrough came when their soundtrack for Little Miss Sunshine became the soundtrack to many an al fresco dinner.

Onstage, the sense of dislocation is keenly felt in the lonesome howl of Urata’s vocals, filtered through an old radio microphone and an echo unit. Johnny Ray yodelling in the Urals couldn’t sound weirder.

Holding the musical map is accordionist/ violinist Tom Hagerman, and marking the steps are Jeannie Shroder on upright bass and Shawn King on percussion. When Schroder wraps a fairy light-encrusted sousaphone (basically a big tuba) around her frame and begins mischievously parping out the basslines, we know we’ve arrived at a Greek wedding on Mars.

Songs from their new album, A Mad and Faithful Telling,including Head Honcho, Basso Profundo, Transliteratorand Along The Way, barely show the joins between the band's myriad musical influences, while covers of Velvet Underground's Venus In Fursand Siouxsie the Banshees' The Last Beat of My Heartnicely underline DeVotchKa's otherness. KEVIN COURTNEY

Philip Carty (piano)

NCH John Field Room

Philip Carty— The Rosary.

This recital was devoted to the first performance of Philip Carty's piano work The Rosary.Each of its four sections consists of five movements, beginning with the Annunciation, moving through the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, and culminating in the coronation of Mary as Queen of Heaven. It lasts around 75 minutes.

One thing that emerged immediately is that Philip Carty is a very good pianist, with a fine control of texture and voicing. His music has an accessible surface – in this case harmony, phrasing and rhythm that are rooted in impressionism and mid 20th-century modality.

However, it is also of our time in that

each of its 20 short movements is non-developmental, dominated by a kind of moto perpetuo progress in which none of the music is really fast or really slow; and contrasts are based almost entirely on figuration and on harmonic shifts from one level to another in a way that almost entirely eschews traditional concepts of harmonic tension.

Everything is well-crafted in the sense that it moves naturally; and the control of detail appears to arise more from a refined ear and sense of pianistic propriety than from self-conscious command of compositional or playing technique. The beautifully presented programme booklet mentioned Bach and other composers of religious music. However, musical representation is not embedded in structure, as in Bach or in the formidable musical intellect of Messiaen. For example, “the 12 prayers contained within a mystery of the Rosary” are presented as colouristic figurations using all 12 pitches of the octave. The musical result is more sensual than intellectual.

All this epitomises the modernity of the musical and religious sentiment. The music and the printed programme declare religious truth; but objective affirmation of that truth seems less important than what we feel about it. MARTIN ADAMS