Irish Timeswriters review a selection of recent events

A Midsummer Night’s Dream

People’s Park, Waterford

Ben Hennessy's spirited and inventive production of A Midsummer Night's Dreamis an adventurous, fun-filled, family-friendly venture which remains utterly faithful to Shakespeare's play. Despite being better subtitled Play in the Car Park, Hennessey creates a forest within Fosset's Big Top circus tent with a landscape of layered plants which are laddered up towards the canvas ceiling to conceal entrances and exits in a magical way. Joe Harney's original composition conspires with Chris Tyler's sound design to enhance the supernatural atmosphere, and the purple and yellow hues of Conor Nolan's lights also create an otherworldliness within the natural environment of the dressed tent.

A community collaboration, the play is performed by a mix of professional and amateur actors, but the less experienced cast members certainly step up to the mark, enlivening the subplot of the star-crossed lovers. Holly Browne and Anne O’Riordan, in particular, display a sophisticated understanding and enunciation of the verse. Meanwhile, a group of young performers from the area create a flurry of sparkling fairies, dancing across the earthen floor.

However, A Midsummer Night's Dreamis always stolen by the rude mechanicals, and with Seamus Nolan as the asinine Bottom/Pyramus, Ben Quinlan as Flute/Thisbe and Jamie Murphy as Starveling/The Wall, the best bits of Red Kettle's production fall within the play-within-the-play device. At €10 a ticket, the Big Top was bursting with families, who remained engaged and animated until the closing moments, when "fairy time" descended on the night outside and the children were carried out home to their beds. This democratic pricing is to be applauded as much as the democratic production structure, which ensured that this production of A Midsummer Night's Dreaminvolved and engaged with as large a Waterford audience as possible. SARA KEATING

Run Finished

Dom Columba McCann (organ)

St Mary's, Dublin

The organ-playing skills of Fr John McCann passed into legend during the long period he served as a priest in the diocese of Dublin. He had held the high-ranking post of organist at St Michael's, Dún Laoghaire, but ordination naturally meant putting his performing career on hold. Since joining the vibrantly musical fraternity of Glenstal Abbey, Dom McCann has been getting back to his instrument. Wednesday's lunchtime concert – the last in this year's month-long series at St Mary's Pro-Cathedral – marked a distinguished return to the Dublin organ recital scene.

Taking pride of place at the centre of the programme was the highly charged polyphony of Bach's Magnificat FugueBWV 733. Adjoining it were works by two Parisian organists: the exacting scherzo Naïadesfrom Vierne's fourth suite of fantasy pieces, and the last two movements from Dupré's imposing Symphonie Passion. These strongly contrasted items were framed by two improvisations, the first a transcription by François Lombard of a prelude once extemporised by the flamboyant Notre Dame organist Pierre Cochereau.

Thanks to zestful and communicative performing, the weighty selection of music made for 45 minutes of absorbing listening. There seemed more to the intricacies of Vierne than a study in fancy fingerwork, while the grand gestures of Dupré and Cochereau bore their ceremonial massiveness with poise.

No less memorable was Dom McCann's impromptu treatment of a submitted theme, the Easter sequence Victimae paschali laudes. Conceived as a semi-continuous suite in nine varied sections, the outcome was unscripted music-making at its pithiest and most purposeful. ANDREW JOHNSTONE

Hilliard Ensemble

St Patrick's Cathedral, Dundalk

There's a conventional wisdom that the repertoire of the mainstream classical concert has become too narrow. And it's certainly the case that the body of work from Bach to the late romantics is as hugely popular with audiences as it is with leading performers and orchestras.

There are, of course, other ways of approaching programme planning than those commonly espoused by symphony orchestras and virtuosos. Take the all-male vocal quartet, the Hilliard Ensemble, who gave the second of Louth Contemporary Music Society's Temenos 2009 concerts at St Patrick's Cathedral, Dundalk, last Thursday.

Rather than engage with the widely familiar, the Hilliards concentrated instead on the new and the very old, on work by living composers and on music that's at the far end of the early music spectrum. Thursday's programme, titled Arkhangelos, included works by James MacMillan, Jonathan Wild, Ivan Moody, Arvo Pärt and Alexander Raskatov. There were arrangements of Armenian religious chants by Komitas Vardapet, a chant from an 11th-or 12th-century Italian manuscript, a 15th-century lauda, and one of the two surviving pieces by the 16th-century composer John Sheryngham.

The Hilliard's distinctive sound is governed both by the unusual line-up (countertenor, two tenors and baritone) as well as by a style that favours individuality of tone rather than fineness of blend. The pressured countertenor tone of David James is often the dominant colouring, almost as if he's the soloist with a compliant backing group.

The programme wasn't just a juxtaposition of new and old, but also of East and West, with Arkhangelosby the English composer Ivan Moody providing a clear link. Moody, who lives in Portugal, was ordained a priest in the Orthodox Church in 2007, and his teachers included the most famous of Orthodox-influenced English musicians, John Tavener. In the event, the performances didn't quite live up to the tantalising prospects that were offered by such a richly layered programme.

The considerable technical demands of James MacMillan's . . . here in hiding. . . and Alexander Raskatov's Praise, which framed the evening, were not fully met, although the saturated climaxes of the Raskatov were hugely impressive.

It was in fact the simplest music which sounded best, not least because of moments of suspect intonation which marred the more overtly demanding works. Komitas's sharakans were unfailingly affecting, as were the refrains of Sheryngham's Ah, gentle Jesu, and the insistently repeated invocations of Pärt's Most Holy Mother of God. MICHAEL DERVAN