Reviews today looks at the New Ross Piano Festival, the Brazil Now! Festival and There Are Little Kingdoms at the Granary Theatre in Cork
New Ross Piano Festival
St Mary's Church,
New Ross
The New Ross Piano Festival and its artistic director, Finghin Collins, work to the clearest of formulas. The piano repertoire is explored over three days, both solo and in ensemble, by pianists from at home and abroad, with programmes designed to afford the opportunity of hearing up to three different pairs of hands in a single concert (once, in 2007, that rose to four pairs, through the introduction of some piano duets).
Each festival also includes two plain and simple daytime solo recitals, given by pianists whose names are less well-established. The star turn this year was Peter Tuite, who concentrated on pairs of major figures from the 18th and 20th centuries.
His approach to Haydn (the Sonata in E flat, Hob XVI: 49) and Mozart (the Fantasy in C minor, K475) was one of extraordinary calculation and tonal refinement, every note and pause measured and weighted, with some of the silences teasingly extended well beyond their specified lengths.
Tuite's is the kind of playing that could seem self-aggrandising in classical repertoire, but the effect on this occasion was to focus attention securely on the music itself.
In the music of the 20th century he was even more impressive. He offered four of the pieces Luciano Berio published as Six Encores( Brin, Leaf, Wasserklavierand Erdenklavier), conveying them as perfect miniatures, each exploring distinctive facets of keyboard sonority in ways that were fully engaging, not least in the hushed romanticism of Wasserklavier.
Tuite has made a special study of Messiaen, and ended with a piece from the composer's great piano work of the 1950s, La Buse Variable( The Buzzard), from the Catalogue d'Oiseaux. His achievement here was to make the music sound as fully of the world of bird-song pictorialism in music as of the angular abrasiveness of the 1950s avant-garde.
The centenary of Messiaen's birth was also commemorated in a rather rough-hewn late-night performance of the Quartet for the End of Time, with Collins at the piano joined by violinist Muriel Cantoreggi, clarinettist Emma Johnson and cellist Marc Coppey.
The other chamber performances were all of trios. Cantoreggi's over-loud violin playing unbalanced Mendelssohn's fleet and sweet D minor Trio, with Coppey on cello and Philip Martin on piano. And in Brahms's late Clarinet Trio, the three players (Johnson and Coppey with Cristina Ortiz) didn't seem to have reached sufficient agreement on exactly how the music should go. The strongest of the chamber performances was a vitally incisive account of the suite from Stravinsky's Soldier's Tale, with Cantoreggi, Johnson and Collins delighting in the composer's quirky dances.
Collins himself made three heart-warming solo contributions, in Haydn's Variations in F minor, Beethoven's Sonata in C minor, Op 111 (where his high-contrast approach created a deal too much stress in the opening movement), and Schumann's Bunte Blätter, a patchwork piece that's full of good things.
Philip Martin is a player who has willingly espoused pianistic lost causes and is currently giving a new lease of life in concert (and on disc) to the works of Louis Moreau Gottschalk (1829-69) and Henri Herz (1803-88). Herz's harmonies are so stale and his figuration is so dull that it's hard to imagine Martin's campaigning will lead to a long-term revival. But Gottschalk, once dubbed "the Chopin of the Creoles", has a giddy, fantastical streak that always makes his work attractive in small helpings. I don't think I've ever heard Martin serve these high-jinks pieces as well as he did on this occasion. Martin is also a composer, and played his recent Prisms, a short and sweet seven-movement suite with popular overtones that sounded - and may well have been - hand-crafted for his own light- fingered velocity.
French pianist Nicolas Stavy gave the second daytime solo recital, focusing on works by Chopin and Liszt. His Liszt - he played the Bénédiction de Dieu dans la solitudeand Funéraillesfrom the Harmonies poétiques et réligieuses- was of the style that gets the player a good name and the composer a bad one. The Bénédictionin particular got lost in climaxes that left nowhere meaningful to go when there was still a lot of music to get through. This very able player's Chopin was a lot more cultured - he offered the Prelude, Op 45, the Op 59 Mazurkas and the Polonaise-Fantaisie- and the calmer the manner, the better the music sounded.
Almost the opposite could be said of Cristina Ortiz, who has long made a speciality of the music of her native Brazil, which she plays with a buoyancy of spirit that immediately evokes the sun-drenched festivities of a famously festive land. Collins scheduled her to round off the closing concert, where, in a strange musical sandwich, she played three reflective late pieces by Brahms between exuberantly colourful pieces by Fructuoso Vianna and Villa-Lobos. It was almost as effective as a firework display. MICHAEL DERVAN
Brazil Now! Festival
Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin
Rodolfo Coelho de Souza - What happens beneath the bed while Janis sleeps? Edson Zampronha - Concerto for Piano and Electroacoustic Sounds. Victor Lazzarini - Mouvements. Rodolfo Coelho de Souza - Impromptu in Blackbird Form.
Always a consolation for the end of summer is the Hugh Lane Gallery's free Sunday at Noon concert series, which resumed last weekend. The opening concert - which was also the first event of Dublin's Brazil Now! Festival - featured works by four Brazilian composers who were all present and took part.
If you weren't too hung up figuring out the relevance of the title, What happens beneath the bed while Janis sleeps?was an absorbing piece for tape composed by Rodolfo Coelho de Souza in 1997. The printed programme described how he wrote it during the summer holidays at the University of Texas, where he encountered echoing, empty corridors and sensed the ghostly resonance of a rock star who had attended there years previously. Sampled sounds on the tape include trains, wind and rain, voices, and rock-guitar riffs, all thoughtfully combined and layered in a piece that powerfully stirred up the imagination.
Problems with the title were less easily surmounted in Edson Zampronha's 2004 Concerto for Piano and Electroacoustic Sounds. The word "concerto" inevitably sets up expectations, which were disappointed here by an imbalance in interest between a bland piano part (consisting mostly of repeated figurations) and the great variety and animation he had created on tape.
Mouvements(2003) is pure computer music, composed by Victor Lazzarini at NUI Maynooth, where he is director of the Music Technology Laboratory. The 10-minute piece's many sonorities ranged from the bright and tinkling to the deep and elemental, giving way at one point to a kind of rhythmic fugal counterpoint before a fading coda.
The big finale was Coelho de Souza's Impromptu in Blackbird Form. It offered an extraordinary range of sounds extracted from the cuica, an Afro-Brazilian drum, combined with a vast array of live orchestral and native Brazilian percussion instruments played by the composer and percussionist, Paulo Demarchi. Out of this emerged bird and animal sounds, a rainstorm, and the jungle at night. MICHAEL DUNGAN
There Are Little Kingdoms
Granary Theatre, Cork
Kevin Barry's stage adaptation of his own short-story collection, There Are Little Kingdoms, justifies the Blood+Bandage claim to call its programme of new writing a festival. A sense that this debut production is an event deepens as the play progresses; there is a feeling, similar perhaps to the first nights of Disco Pigs(by Enda Walsh) or Father Mathew(by Sean McCarthy), that something auspicious is happening and deserves celebration.
The writer might prefer that no comparisons were offered, but he will have to endure the suggestion that his play recalls both the structure and the style of Dylan Thomas's Under Milk Wood. It is carried on separate voices which enact the narrative as episodes, like paragraphs seeping into one another; and the tale is of a rural, if not rustic, community. What's missing is the love with which Thomas infused his pastoral. Barry can't risk love, or at least not yet, and a good thing too. He has a ruthless voice of his own, and sentiment would flatten the accuracy with which he eviscerates Irish life. Much of this is very funny, but again Barry is too disciplined to allow his comic consciousness disrupt his examination of an Ireland collapsing faster than the dissolution of the monasteries.
Seven players present a series of reappearing characters to whom nothing happens, or at least not much, as they spend their unreflecting lives in and around a village. There is the local idiot savant, there are the lads, there are the site-farmers, and the stranger, and the brace of nasty sexy girls from Dublin. There are the cruelties and fantasies and ordinary everyday mystifications (such as croissants at the petrol station).
Barry's observations are acutely phrased, and the play is packed with swift, memorable lines delivered in what sounds like the authentic half-language of familiarity, almost a patois, a localised way of saying things, of understanding what is not being said.
Director Brian Desmond has got extremely good performances from every one of his cast, and Medb Lambert's set of car and truck tyres hints appropriately at something being discarded. The only real weakness, which surely can be fixed, is an absence of shape, emphasised by the touch of the Rev Eli Jenkins (of Under Milk Wood) at the unheralded and inconclusive end. Until Sat MARY LELAND
