"One of the highlights of Galway's theatrical year" and Ennio Morricone at the Belfast Arts Festival feature today.
Baboró: NIE Trilogy
Town Hall, Galway
In 1943, a young Hungarian called Andras Tomas was kidnapped by the Wehrmacht and pressed into action on the Russian front. He was quickly captured by the Red Army, who eventually sent him to a Siberian institution for the mentally ill. To his doctors, Tomas seemed indisputably mad, a diagnosis they based on the fact that he spoke a strange, incomprehensible language. That opinion persisted until 1999, when a young doctor arrived at the institute as part of an EU exchange. He discovered that Tomas had been speaking an obscure Hungarian dialect all along and that, although he was shellshocked, he was also perfectly sane.
At once hilarious and tragic, these events form the core of Long Journey Home, the first part of a trilogy from New International Encounter (NIE), a collective of theatre artists from six European countries. As re-imagined by the company, Tomas's story becomes emblematic of the history of 20th-century Europe, his fate revealing how entire lives were destroyed because of the refusal by one set of people to comprehend the customs and world view of others.
NIE's aim, we soon realise, is not to record Europe's barbaric past but, through performance, to react against it. They do this in two ways.
First, the company blends multiple performance styles and languages: music, puppetry, mime, clowning and storytelling come together with dialogue in English, French, German and many other languages. This provides a practical illustration of NIE's belief that there are many ways of seeing the world.
Second, NIE is retrieving the stories of the forgotten and uncelebrated. In the trilogy's second part, Past Half Remembered, we view the history of the Soviet Union as it was experienced by a likeable but unremarkable woman. The finale, The End of Everything Ever, reminds us of the fate of the Kindertransport children, the 10,000 Jewish children evacuated from Nazi Germany between 1937 and 1939. This focus on ordinary people restates the essential dignity of people who find themselves on the margins of history.
The trilogy, staged on successive nights, was part of Baboró, Galway's annual arts festival for children, which celebrates its 12th birthday this year. The organisers brought NIE to Galway, they state, as a gift to those children who have grown up with the festival.
It's hard to imagine a more generous present: affirmative but unsparingly honest, the NIE trilogy is one of the highlights of Galway's theatrical year thus far.
PATRICK LONERGAN
Belfast Festival: Ennio Morricone
Waterfront Hall
Creative genius comes in many shapes, sizes and temperaments. In the case of Ennio Morricone, it comes understated, impassive and unshowy. And while the 80-year-old maestro may have opted to remain somewhat detached from the rapt capacity audience at Waterfront Hall, the glamorous players of the Roma Sinfonietta clearly adore him and played their hearts out for him in the opening concert of the Ulster Bank Belfast Festival at Queen's.
It is a terrific coup for the festival to have secured two concerts by this iconic figure, whose compositions have made as vital a contribution to the movie culture of our time as the work of any actor or director. He has composed more than 400 film scores in just over four decades, as well as a substantial body of what he terms "absolute music".
In this, his first visit to these shores and his only Irish booking of the year, he unobtrusively worked his way through extracts from some of his most memorable scores, reproducing precisely the same orchestration as the original soundtracks. For some of the time, the absence of a visual element proved to be of little consequence, so complete and multilayered are the compositions themselves. There were, however, a number of lush, faultlessly performed sequences, punctuated with dramatic instrumental interjections, where one was left with the sensation of getting a film without the images, of being stranded in a spectacular but uncharted musical wilderness.
Swedish-born soprano Susanna Rigacci is the solo voice of Morricone's concerts. Her sultry, willowy presence and distinctive voice brought shivers to the spine, whether performing the plaintive Deborah's Themefrom Once Upon a Time in Americaor the frantic The Ecstasy of the Goldtheme from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, the film which arguably defines Morricone's extraordinary creative partnership with director Sergio Leone.
Leone it was whom Morricone praised for giving his scores "more space", and the little musical dramas evolving from their huge body of work was not wasted on the audience. While a ripple of recognition greeted the coyote howl signalling the arrival of The Man with No Nameout of the shimmering desert heat, there was also warm applause for the cool, pulsating playing of pianist Gilda Butta in the lesser-known Scattered Sheetssequence and for Eugenio Mutalipassi's melting Gabriel's Oboefrom The Mission, a score which symbolises the power of music. It made a fitting finale to a programme which but scraped the surface of the genius of the small bespectacled man standing before us.
JANE COYLE
Belfast Festival: Entity
Waterfront Hall
Wayne McGregor is a man of extremes - in a good way. In this, his latest piece for his Random Dance Company, he continues his exploration of the connections and relationships between art and science, the brain and the body, creativity and choreography, movement and the mind. Sounds as interesting as watching paint dry, doesn't it? But such is the uncompromising vision and genius of McGregor and the abilities of the quite remarkable performers at his disposal that he has forged a dance vocabulary that is dazzling, sexy, passionate, unsettling and wondrous to behold. When it comes to asking great things of these 10 dancers, he brooks no refusals.
To a man and woman, they rise to his demands and then some, swooping and diving in a continuous, hour-long series of strange geometric formations which resonate with stylistic references to the formality of classical ballet, the physicality of the wrestling gyms of ancient Greece or the stillness of yoga meditation.
Then, out of the blue, they are hit by something akin to electric-shock treatment, causing their nerve endings to vibrate and their lithe, sinewy bodies to judder and flip out of control.
But Entity is not just about complex dance and physical movement. The stage is backed by a delicate translucent baffle, behind which, through its changing colours, one can just glimpse the minimally clad bodies of the dancers as they enter and exit. To the relentless beat of a mesmerising soundtrack by Joby Talbot, Coldplay and Massive Attack collaborator Jon Hopkins, played live by an electronic string quartet - in another fascinating artistic contrast - a series of images of natural phenomena are flashed on to a huge overhead screen: strings of protein, biological cells, sperm, flowers, human bodies, deep-sea flora and fauna, and a racing greyhound whose beautifully hypnotic image begins and ends proceedings.
McGregor invites a variety of responses to his work, from intellectual to instinctive, and has realised it as part of a wide-ranging project aimed at engaging cognitive science practitioners. Yet he has also managed to retain a level of accessibility and a common point of entry. Put quite simply, Entity is an astonishing, challenging, questioning piece of dance. This single performance sold out two weeks in advance and those audience members who shared in the experience were privileged to do so.
JANE COYLE
Lortie, RTÉ NSO/ Dworzynski
NCH, Dublin
Janácek- Taras Bulba. Mozart- Piano Concerto in F K459. Dvorák -Symphony No 9 (New World).
This concert showed several of the reasons why Michal Dworzynski has been described as "one of Poland's most exciting conducting talents". His body language is lively, his stick technique precise, and in concert he seems in charge of detail but to concentrate more on the music's expressive purposes than on telling the players what to do.
In this concert, he and the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra showed a natural rapport that gave the music-making a striking freedom and spontaneity. Although Janácek's Taras Bulbawas not always tidy in detail, the playing had a vigour that captured very well indeed this music's astonishing colours and weird intensity.
For Mozart's Piano Concerto No 19 in F, K459, the soloist was the Canadian, Louis Lortie, whose clean and colourful playing made for a jolly performance of a piece that is best approached just like that, rather than striving for a profundity it does not possess. Everyone on the platform seemed to be listening as much as they were watching. The result was a communicative and lively account, with notably neat ensemble between orchestra and soloist.
One of the consistent strengths of Dvorák's "New World" Symphony was long-breathed phrasing. In this piece above all, the way in which Dworzynski controlled tempo and let the musicians get on with things paid strong dividends.
The relationships between proportional tempos in successive sections of the slow movement and the Scherzo was flexible, but sufficiently close to make each movement come across as a rhythmic whole, more than as a sequence of contrasts.
That's what I found exciting about this conductor - the ability to encourage music-making that puts expressive purpose first, and to make technique serve that purpose.
MARTIN ADAMS
Wexford Festival: Irish Melodies
St Iberius Church
Una Hunt is celebrating the bicentenary of Thomas Moore's first book of Irish Melodieswith a 23-concert national tour.
Her singers are drawn from a pool of young prizewinners from the Thomas Moore Festival organised earlier this year by the DIT Conservatory of Music and Drama.
Dean Power (tenor), Raphaela Mangan (alto) and Aoife O'Sullivan (soprano) were chosen to give this Wexford Festival performance, which ranged from perennials such as The Last Rose of Summerto neglected treasures such as The Dream of Those Days.
Power was at his best in fervent mode, especially in a march-like The Harp that Once Through Tara's Halls. His more reflective numbers were impaired by a certain huskiness and some bumpy phrasing, but there was a fitting naturalness to his delivery in Has Sorrow Thy Young Days Shaded.
Although a self-consciously operatic sophistication marked Mangan's opening song, Erin! The Tear and the Smile in Thine Eyes, there was an easier trust in technique, and a more verbal drive, to Believe Me if all Those Endearing Young Charms. In The Minstrel Boy, her robust low register was impressive.
At first perhaps over-energised by intense colouring, O'Sullivan quickly settled into tone and phrasing that were utterly charming, thanks to the touching simplicity of her communication in At the Mid Hour of Night, and to her agile diction in Fly Not Yet.
At the piano, Hunt's compelling advocacy of the accompaniments by Balfe and Stanford informed the interpretations with poise and rhetoric. Her exuberant playing of Wallace's Fantasia on the Minstrel Boy and Rory O'Morebrought an exercise in derivative nationalism springing to new life.
The tour is enhanced by an exhibition, recordings, and a website.
Perhaps most importantly of all, though, it's equipping a rising peer group with songs they will always want to sing.
ANDREW JOHNSTONE
