The Irish Timeswriters review the latest in the arts

Philip Glass

St Nicholas' Church, Galway

On the evidence of his chamber music concert at the Galway Arts Festival, Philip Glass might well be the world's most boring composer. He's not, of course. After all, he's one of those rare birds who, back in the late 1960s and early 1970s, forged an immediately recognisable, individual voice. Although he doesn't seem to appreciate the label minimalist, he's been a leader in one of the defining movements in American music over the last four decades.

He's among the most sought-after of film composers of our time. Yet, on the other hand, there's no getting away from the fact that this concert - for piano (Glass himself), cello (Wendy Sutter) and percussion (Mick Rossi) - was really quite a bore.

Ten years ago, when he was the featured composer at the Belfast Festival, Glass made the point that "The composer's first problem is to find a voice. The second is to get rid of it." He's scored extremely well on the first count, altogether less well so on the second.

Take his new Songs and Poems for solo cello, for which at the moment Wendy Sutter has sole performing rights. Here he has stretched his trademark rocking figures from their usual interval of a third, to a fifth, to match the open strings of a cello. The result often sounds as if the cellist has got lost in the rocking opening of Bach's First Cello Suite and is fighting a futile battle to get on or get out.

On the level of pure sound, the piece and Sutter's performance of it will have delighted anyone turned on by an orgy of lusciously loud, slightly raspy cello tone. But the poignant moments of the classic Glass piano style, which typically work on the principle that a change is as good as a rest, hardly figure in the new work.

Part of the problem is that Glass has not satisfactorily resolved the challenges of making his familiar, essentially chordal style, effective for melodic use. Nowhere was this more obvious than in the trio arrangement of Closing from Glassworks.

This places the cello firmly in the limelight, where it's obliged to bear a burden of attention that the melodic writing simply cannot carry. The vitality and energy of Glass's best work was simply nowhere to be found in this concert.

It was clear to me that I was in a tiny minority in my responses.

Even though the solo piano pieces from the great man himself had been far fewer in number than the printed programme promised, the fans roared, cheered and whistled their approval at the end.

Philip Glass appears in Dundalk tonight with Ioana Petcu-Colan (violin), Gerard McChrystal (saxophone) and the Dublin Guitar Quartet.

MICHAEL DERVAN

Molora

Town Hall Theatre, Galway

When it comes to tragedy, is fate always sealed or can the cycle of violence and revenge ever be broken? That's the question behind Yael Farber's beautifully staged, if dramaturgically muddled, version of The Oresteia, one that transplants the blood-soaked grievances of the House of Atreus to the arena of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa.

The Ngqoko Cultural Group, providing our chorus, take to the stage with slow ceremony; their gradually building Xhosa harmonies and sparing musical accompaniment providing a solemn sense of ritual and witness. At opposite ends of an almost bare stage, Clytemnestra and Electra face each other and the air between them hangs heavy with retribution.

As Clytemnestra, the white actor Dorothy Ann Gould seethes out a confession of murdering Agamemnon, her husband and Electra's father, with hissing sibilance and zero remorse. Jabulile Tshabalala, her enslaved black daughter, maintains a more righteous dignity, although she is no more forgiving.The context is moving, but confused. The Truth and Reconciliation Commissions, where oppressors and victims testified in exchange for amnesty, were inspirationally restrained, aiding South Africa's peaceful transition to democracy. Defusing conflict, however, is rarely good for drama - theatre thrives on the stuff - and so Farber stokes our sense of outrage with several scenes of torture, recreated with horrifying but overawing effect.

Gould's queen may have lost her soul long ago, but her demonisation unbalances the political metaphor and lessens the psychological complexity of the tragedy. It becomes hard, then, to accept her heavy-handed mea culpa: "We who made the sons and daughters of this land servants in the halls of their forefathers, we know we are here only by their grace." This new resolution, which stems the original's bloodletting, requires more than a little negotiation with Aeschylus, who had no such escape clause in his contract with the gods. But if the textual intervention seem forced, Farber's staging never does. With spellbinding simplicity, Michael Maxwell's lights allow sand, smoke and, above all, ash, to form diaphanous shrouds around the characters. Ash, indeed, is the translation of the title, and as it rains down from the sky Farber makes her point with affecting subtlety: that vengeance is destructive and useless in the face of our more humbling shared destiny. Until Saturday

PETER CRAWLEY