Dublin
Béatrice et Bénédict, Irish National Opera, National Concert Hall, Dublin review - sung and spoken triumphWednesday, 02 October 2024
As Fiona Shaw’s shiningly free and easy narration told us, Shakespeare’s sparring Beatrice and Benedick are merely counterpoint to a supposedly comic plot that becomes a potential tragedy, and tests the japers’ seriousness. Berlioz wanted none of... Read more... |
Album: Fontaines DC - RomanceSaturday, 24 August 2024
Whether it’s maturing or selling out, the tendency for rock bands to soften and smooth down their sound is understandable and, for fans, usually dispiriting – edge, purity, and strangeness evaporate as the dollars roll in. With their fourth album... Read more... |
Abel Selaocoe / Dermot Dunne & Martin Tourish, Dublin International Chamber Music Festival - genius transfigures geniusFriday, 07 June 2024
No-one in the musical world could possibly surpass the communicative skills of Abel Selaocoe – pushing the boundaries of cello and vocal technique in a myriad of voices, all cohering in works of staggering breadth, getting the audience to sing at... Read more... |
Gomyo, National Symphony Orchestra, Kuokman, National Concert Hall, Dublin review - painful brilliance around a heart of darknessSaturday, 11 May 2024
No soloist gets to perform Shostakovich’s colossal First Violin Concerto without mastery of its fearsome technical demands. But not all violinists have the imagination to colour and inflect the Hamlet-like monologue of its withdrawn first movement,... Read more... |
All You Need Is Death review - a future folk horror classicFriday, 19 April 2024
Music, when the singer’s voice dies away, vibrates in the memory. In the hypnotic new Irish horror film All You Need Is Death, those who search for long-unheard songs crave a certain melody that works a terrible magic on the living. In this... Read more... |
Bach St John Passion, Dublin Bach Singers, Marlborough Baroque Orchestra, Murphy, St Ann's Church, Dublin - choral fireMonday, 25 March 2024
Was it worth taking a risk on a more humbly presented St John Passion in Dublin after the best St Matthew I’m ever likely to hear (from Peter Whelan and the Irish Baroque Ensemble in St Patrick’s Cathedral)?The answer, post-performance, is yes:... Read more... |
WAKE, National Stadium, Dublin review - a rainbow river of dance, song, and so much elseThursday, 21 March 2024
In what feels like the beginning, or at least the Old Testament, there was Riverdance. Now, ready to flow through the world once the world knows it needs it, there’s a rainbow-coloured river of just about everything musical and choreographic that’s... Read more... |
Salome, Irish National Opera review - imaginatively charted journey to the abyssMonday, 18 March 2024
“Based on the play by Oscar Wilde,” declared publicity on Dublin buses and buildings, reminding opera-cautious citizens that the poet whose text Richard Strauss used for his own Salome grew up only 10 minutes’ walk away from Daniel Libeskind's Bord... Read more... |
St Matthew Passion, Irish Baroque Orchestra, Whelan, St Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin review - fluency, fire and some jaw-dropping solosSaturday, 02 March 2024
After last year’s small-scale, big-impact Messiah in the Wigmore Hall, superlatives are again in order for the IBO’s performance of the greatest musical offering known to humankind. With the fluency established by that most supple of directors Peter... Read more... |
'Migrations' String Quartet Weekend, National Concert Hall, Dublin review - memorials and masterpiecesTuesday, 27 February 2024
It was chance that the National Concert Hall’s weekend of quartet events featuring responses to war and refugees should coincide with the second anniversary of Putin’s Invasion of Ukraine. By late Saturday morning thousands of Ukrainians and friends... Read more... |
Sánchez, National Symphony Orchestra, Martín, National Concert Hall, Dublin review - Spanish panacheSaturday, 24 February 2024
Ravel’s Boléro, however well you think you know it, usually wows in concert with its disconcerting mix of sensuality, fun and violence. Context can make it even more powerful: in this case as the culmination of NSO Chief Conductor Jaime Martín’s... Read more... |
Kin, Series 2, BBC One review - when crime dynasties collideMonday, 19 February 2024
The end of the first series of Kin found Dublin’s Kinsella crime family ridding themselves of bloodsucking drug baron Eamon Cunningham, but this was not an unalloyed blessing. As this second series opens, the Kinsellas are having to make new... Read more... |
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