Michael Dervan reviews the NYSOI/Yuasa and RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra at the NCH, Dublin. Peter Crawley reviews James Blunt at the Point
NYSOI/Yuasa at the NCH, Dublin
Dukas - The Sorcerer's Apprentice. Debussy - La mer.
Stravinsky - Rite of Spring.
The premiere of Stravinsky's ballet The Rite of Spring at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées in Paris on May 29th, 1913, with choreography by Vaslav Nijinsky to a scenario by Nikolai Roerich, created one of the greatest musical scandals of the 20th century.
The scandal was not entirely due to Stravinsky's music. Nijinsky's choreography was at least as radical in its breaches with convention. And if recordings from around that time are anything to go by - Beecham recorded excerpts from Stravinsky's Firebird in 1916 - the orchestra's handling of the score's rhythmical complexities and unusual instrumental demands probably compounded things considerably.
The Rite has, of course, long been adopted into the standard concert repertoire, even to the point of being treated as a kind of orchestral showpiece. And it's within the grasp of youth orchestras, whose exhibitionist inclinations can have a field day in the piece's more extrovert moments.
The National Youth Symphony Orchestra of Ireland's performance under Takuo Yuasa at the National Concert Hall on Saturday was not, however, the most disciplined performance I've heard from this body.
There were sometimes prominent shortcomings of rhythmic alignment, of intonational accuracy, and of musical balance.
Significant lines were sometimes hard to hear, whereas, at other times, individual instruments took a soloistic prominence beyond their musical importance.
But The Rite is a work whose extraordinary vitality is virtually impossible to contain. And if this performance was more consistently successful in the chunkily dancing passages than in moments of slower, atmospheric filigree, it was at all times engaging. And it served as a kind of reminder of the extraordinary rawness of energy that listeners were confronted with at its Paris premiere over 90 years ago.
The seascapes of the three symphonic sketches of Debussy's La mer are less tolerant of rough handling than Stravinsky's Rite. And the handling on this occasion was rather on the rough side.
The delivery of the opening work, Dukas's Sorcerer's Apprentice, was, by contrast, a lot more sober, and a lot more telling in its musical outcome.
In fact, there was often a polish and refinement to the playing here, which promised rather more in terms of technical security than the rest of the evening was actually to deliver. - Michael Dervan
James Blunt, The Point, Dublin
With the notable exception of the Crazy Frog, no one divided opinion in 2005 quite like James Blunt. The 28-year-old ex-army officer released the year's biggest selling album in the UK, a ballad-heavy concoction of polite tunes and dripping sentimentality.
This forward march from obscurity to ubiquity also earned Blunt a more dubious honour: to his detractors, his name has entered the dictionary of rhyming slang.
Still, in the sea of couples who fill up the first of Blunt's two dates in The Point, you can't ignore his selling point.
Women gaze up adoringly at him while men make every outward show of having been dragged here by force.
With hair so artfully dishevelled, jeans so artfully distressed and lyrics so artfully consoling ("And if you want to talk about it anymore/ Lie here on the floor and cry on my shoulder") Blunt is a fantasy boyfriend, a lover and a fighter.
In performance, his music is brisk and regimented. Yet Blunt, who speaks with the clipped tones vital to field communication, now battles with a problem of his own making - namely, the vociferous nature of James Blunt fans.
In a cunning tactical manoeuvre, Blunt urges these fans to "maybe save the singing towards the end" on Goodbye, My Lover. They do not.
His best song, No Bravery, performed solo over a resounding upright piano, silences the crowd with his experiences in Kosovo, its harrowing detail at odds with the safer lyrical territory of love-and-loss.
His surprising cover of the Pixies' unhinged Where is My Mind? is faithful, but so crisply enunciated that it now sounds entirely hinged.
"I'm so hollow," goes one Blunt chorus and therein lies the appeal of that inescapable single You're Beautiful, a song of deep and empty resonance. However, we have to sway to something. - Peter Crawley
Collins, RTÉ NSO/Markson, NCH, Dublin
Mussorgsky/Shostakovich - Prelude to Khovanshchina.
Mozart - Piano Concerto in G K453. Shostakovich - Symphony No 5.
Friday's programme from the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra waded straight into what will be two of the major anniversary-led musical preoccupations of 2006, the work of Mozart and Shostakovich.
Shostakovich is one of numerous composers who turned his hand to providing viable versions of pieces left incomplete by Modest Mussorgsky on his death at the age of 42 in 1881.
In the case of the unfinished opera Khovanshchina Shostakovich's version stands against one by Rimsky- Korsakov. Shostakovich is truer to the spirit of Mussorgsky.
His colouring of the Prelude, for instance, is sparer than Rimsky's and he didn't alter harmonies which Rimsky "corrected" as being too uncouth.
In spite of some ragged string playing at the very start, Gerhard Markson and the RTÉ NSO's handling of this evocation of dawn on the Moscow River was nicely atmospheric.
Shostakovich's fifth and most popular symphony was the first to receive a public airing (in November 1937) after the ignominy of the composer's official public dressing down - in the pages of Pravda - after his opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk had triggered the disapproval of Stalin.
The ready accessibility of the musical idiom, the symphony's clear formal relationship to historical models, and the music's unmissable high emotional charge created a popular success so great it might easily have backfired on the troubled composer.
The precise spur for the stylistic turnaround for a man renowned for his acidic wit and sardonic musical manner has been a matter of debate from the start. And that debate has been fuelled in recent years by commentators who wish to read a distinct anti-Soviet message into the finale.
The emotional tone of Gerhard Markson's reading was, however, more formal than personal. But it was nevertheless imposing in its gravity, and found a way of being both burly and incisive in the strongly Mahlerian Allegretto.
Finghin Collins was the deft and neat soloist in Mozart's Piano Concerto in C, K453, placing the emphasis on beauty of tone and elegance of delivery rather than depth of expression. Markson matched Collins in style and the music- making was at its finest in the bubbling energy of the finale. - Michael Dervan
