Dublin
David Nice
Promising on paper, dazzling in practice: with a superlative soloist and conductor, this programme just soared on wings of philosophy-into-music. The spotlighting of NSO co-leader Elaine Clark provided another thread, from the opening chant of Linda Buckley‘s Fall Approaches through the keen dialogues with collegial Baiba Skride in Bernstein’s dazzling Serenade to the Viennese-waltz Dance Song of Strauss’s Also sprach Zarathustra.Clark's fellow strings joined her – the violinist pictured below – in a flight brilliantly marshalled and focused by Diego Matheuz, due to conduct next Friday's Read more ...
David Nice
Is Gounod’s Faust really a “complex and multi-layered work”, as director Jack Furness claims? Goethe’s original and Berlioz’s Damnation, absolutely; this tuneful concoction, half light opera, half kitsch melodrama, not so much. If Furness’s take leads him to concept overload, as well as quite a few really strong ideas, the big strength here lies in the casting of three world-class singers in the eternal triangle of rake, seduceable innocent and devil.The old, suicide-bent Faust’s crisis of scientific knowledge leaving a religious void causes Furness to set the action in a late 19th century Read more ...
David Nice
Church and law are enemies of promise in Ibsen’s tragedy-without-catharis. You can see why this devastating attack on, among other things, the syphilitic sins of the fathers being visited on the hopeful young created a ruckus in the 1880s. It’s still potent thanks to the characters’ complex reactions to social constraints. Mark O’Rowe’s new version for Landmark Productons at the Abbey is faithful to the essence, while sets and costumes only reinforce modernity in period dress.Francis O'Connor's set is a crucial, at times crushing, participant in the slow-burn revelation of past sins wreaking Read more ...
David Nice
Who’d have thought Florence Price, Rachmaninov, Gershwin and Brahms would all fit the (unspoken) theme of 1930s America? Brahms made the bill by virtue of Schoenberg’s 1937 arrangement of the C minor Piano Quartet, so outlandish and camp that you’d be tempted to credit Stokowski as the orchestrator. Like Rachmaninov’s Rhapsody on the Theme of Paganini, it needs vertiginous audacity: that came in spades from conductor Joshua Weilerstein and pianist Martin James Bartlett.Weilerstein and an orchestra sounding especially lustrous in the string section made the best possible case for currently Read more ...
David Nice
This Palm Sunday served up an epiphany. Previous encounters with Handel's Messiah, in whatever version, and whether listening or performing, turned out to have been through a glass darkly. And here we were face to face with undiluted genius, served with total consistency by 26 musicians running the gamut from intimacy through fury to great blazes, all guided by the extraordinary spirit of IBO artistic director Peter Whelan.You’ll perhaps have noticed that the choir is without a name. Clearly the Irish Baroque Orchestra needs one of its own, and these 12 would be the dream team – perhaps eight Read more ...
Joe Muggs
U2 are better than their many critics make out. Their Stakhanovite work ethic in creating huge sonics, not-a-bolt-out-of-place songwriting and stagecraft that could reach every corner of the biggest venues long before the days of giant LED screens made them the biggest band in the world with good reason. Bono Vox’s “Marmite personality” was also a big part of that: it pretty much requires a messiah complex to work that hard to reach that many people. U2 are also worse than many of their defenders will admit. As Bono’s Great Statesman act became his defining facet, it sucked Read more ...
David Nice
Commuting between London and Dublin has its fascinations.10 days ago, I saw for the first time at the Southwark Playhouse’s Elephant Theatre, heart in mouth during most of it, Enda Walsh’s The Walworth Farce, his first Edinburgh Festival Fringe First winner in 2007. Then to Dublin’s Gate Theatre last night for its immediate successor in the Walsh canon and 2008 Edinburgh triumph, The New Electric Ballroom.You could say these possible masterpieces form a diptych, though in an ideal world the substantial dramas would be played on alternating nights, never on the same evening, and despite riffs Read more ...
David Nice
A pot plant on a stand, two tables with glasses of water, two chairs – one plush, one high – are all the props needed on the stage of the Abbey’s second theatre, the Peacock, for the ultimate complete reading of James Joyce’s Ulysses in its 100th year. For Barry McGovern is a master: one of Beckett’s favourite actors, on a par with Billie Whitelaw, and immersed in all things Joycean over the past 30 years (★★★★★).McGovern began his odyssey last Friday morning at 10am, bringing to vivid life the first two, plain-sailing episodes of Ulysses, where we meet Stephen Dedalus not quite happy with Read more ...
David Nice
The organisation now proudly and legitimately re-named the Dublin International Chamber Music Festival may be half a century old – of its 52 seasons, those of the two lockdown years can be lopped off the live reckoning – but its outlook is youthful and progressive in so many ways.Of the four (out of seven) concerts I managed to attend, the one that summed it up most strongly for me was its presentation of five Irish women pianists each playing a piece significant to the performer during lockdown, and another chosen by a key frontline worker – a surprisingly deep and emotional programme Read more ...
David Nice
Dublin is feted as the city of the word, peaking on Bloomsday, 16 June, in celebration of Ulysses’ centenary. Yet its concert and opera scene is broadening in brilliance. Had I known before yesterday that the vivacious Peter Whelan and his Irish Baroque Orchestra were performing Bach’s B minor Mass in Christ Church Cathedral, I might not have chosen to hear what until recently was called the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra of Ireland – and wouldn’t have known what I’d missed.As it happened I got almost the best of both worlds, admitted to the late afternoon rehearsal of the Bach, further Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
Rose (Ann Skelly; The Nevers) is adopted. The name on her birth certificate is Julie and the possibility of a different identity – different clothes, different hair, different accent - beckons. If she could embrace this second life, she thinks, she could be the person she was meant to be. “I’d be the real me.”In their third feature, directors Christine Molloy and Joe Lawlor, both originally from Dublin, continue the themes of identity, role-playing and moments of transformation that they explored in the unsettling, meditative Helen (2008) and Mister John (2013). Rose Plays Julie is also an Read more ...
Veronica Lee
On first sight, Citizen Lane's appeal may seem limited to those with an Irish connection or an interest in fine art. But director Thaddeus O'Sullivan turns what could have been a dry documentary into a witty and fine-looking docudrama about Hugh Lane, a turn-of-the-century art dealer and philanthropist.O'Sullivan utilises talking heads and historical recreation to tell Hugh Lane's rather remarkable story through Mark O’Halloran’s witty script. Lane was part of Ireland's Anglo ascendency – not aristocratic, but landed and monied all the same. Born in County Cork in 1875 and educated in England Read more ...