Dublin
David Nice
Are Seán O'Casey's Dublin plays good for theatre today, or just for the history of Irish drama? My limited recent experience makes it hard to be sure: Juno and the Paycock in London was a liberty-taking mess, and when everyone in a large cast needs to be top-notch - as they are, for instance, in the new production of Gorky's Summerfolk at the National Theatre - any weak performances in The Plough and the Stars scotch O'Casey's experimental ambition as he drops characters for whole acts, introduces others and takes us in unexpected directions, from late 1915 to the Easter Uprising of 1916. Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
Rory Carroll’s previous book, Killing Thatcher, was terrific, and widely praised. It followed the IRA plot to murder the Prime Minister in 1984 and the subsequent police manhunt, telling the story with a journalistic degree of research and a novelistic eye for pacing and drama. For his follow-up Carroll’s gone back further into history to tell the story of the inciting event that ultimately led, along a winding path, to the Brighton bombing: the 1916 Easter Rising in Dublin. A Rebel and a Traitor: A Fugitive, the Manhunt and the Birth of the IRA is, in a different way, as gripping as its Read more ...
David Nice
In one of the loveliest operatic scores of all time, Dvořák makes cruel demands on his eponymous water nymph and the prince for whom she acquires a mortal soul, having them soar above the stave countless times in anguish or ecstasy. Irish soprano Jennifer Davis and American tenor Ryan Capozzo are both equal to the challenge. Unfortunately their characters are bent out of shape by director Netia Jones; the Prince is rendered one-dimensional, and Rusalka poisoning him rather than kissing him to death in the great final scene weakens its impact.
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David Nice
Most concerts of operatic excerpts serve up an after dinner mint. This one offered - to follow up Menotti's image of light versus serious in art - the very bread of life, albeit framed by familiar women's duets from Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro and Delibes' Lakmé. Jennifer Davis, about to make her role debut as Dvořák's Rusalka with Irish National Opera, may have been the initial draw, but mezzo Sarah Richmond was a revelation new to me in major roles, and pianist Aoife O'Sullivan knew no bounds in dramatic torrents, as well as setting up so poetically a perfect Rusalka Song to the Moon. Read more ...
David Nice
Conducting the staple Viennese fare of New Year's Day is no easy task. Quite apart from the basic essential panache - so drearily missing from Austrian Franz Welser-Möst's 2023 shot in Vienna itself, abundantly present this year from live wire Yannick Nézet-Séguin - there has to be the right space for the upbeat to the waltz, freedom in the melodies, energy but not mania in the fast polkas. 27-year-old Tom Fetherstonhaugh, best known as the founder of the enterprising Fantasia Orchestra, has the style in spades, and conveyed it to a clearly impressed National Symphony Orchestra Ireland, Read more ...
David Nice
Would it be possible to get to the end of the year without hearing a single Bruckner symphony live? I’d reckoned without the presence in Dublin of fabulous conductor Anja Bihlmaier, whose 2022 concert with the National Symphony of Ireland was a fine introduction to the thriving concert scene here, and of Boris Giltburg, one of the most engaging living pianists, in Mozart (and a far from insubstantial Schumann encore). Besides, Bruckner’s Ninth gives the lie more than any of the others to any settled spirituality or faith. Here the smoke-into-fire coda of the first movement and the Read more ...
David Nice
Emotional truth backed up by musical sophistication is what saves Puccini’s drama about a geisha deserted by an American officer from mawkishness. Director Daisy Evans has a very good idea for getting at its palpitating heart in a production of stunning visual beauty; Celine Byrne in the title role gives us vocal opulence but not nearly enough identification with a woman whose total, misplaced love leads to painful hope and desperate tragedy.A student who was at a Dublin discussion with Evans told me her essential concept, and I thought it sounded promising: at Pinkerton’s funeral many years Read more ...
David Nice
The greatest procession of mass movements ever composed merits the best line-up of soloists, both vocal and instrumental, as well as the perfect ensemble – small in size, big and rich in sound where needed – and inspired direction. That it was likely to get them seemed obvious from the advertised names, but last night, as always, Peter Whelan inspired everyone to go beyond what we might have imagined.He applies pressure points imperceptibly everywhere so that Bach opens out from period-style devotion to something more operatic, above all in the first choruses of the B minor Mass and Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Night CRIÚ evokes clandestine ceremonies in forest glades, covert rituals taking place in the depths of a cave. Crepuscular and ghostly, this is a realm where an intoned, reverberant voice meshes with ritualistic choirs, undulating brass, methodically bowed strings and unhurried percussion.Musically, the lineage could be the solo work of Dead Can Dance’s Lisa Gerrard or Anna von Hausswolff at her most reductive. If the fifth solo album from the Ireland’s Hilary Woods were employed as the soundtrack to the 1967 Czech film Marketa Lazarová or Werner Herzog’s 1976 Herz aus Glas, it would be a Read more ...
David Nice
One miracle of musical performance is that a work you’ve loved for years can be revealed as never before in an outstanding interpretation. That happened to me last week at the New Ross Piano Festival when 22-year-old pianist Magdalene Cho turned us upside down in Bach’s Sixth Partita. It happened again last night when Peter Whelan and his Irish Baroque Orchestra hit 1788 with one of the three symphonic masterpieces Mozart composed in a single summer, the 39th.Problematic, on the other hand, was the first-half Mozart, third of the four concertos he composed for his beloved horn virtuoso Joseph Read more ...
David Nice
It amuses me that Dubliners dress up in Edwardian finery on 16 June. After all, this was the date in 1904 when James Joyce first walked out with Nora Barnacle and, putting her hand inside his trousers, she “made me a man”. So it’s National Handjob Day. But Bloomsday too, celebrating the jaunts of Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom over 24 hours around Dublin, the song of a great city in Ulysses.This year, four adaptations proved how Joyce is to be heard and acted out, perhaps creating an even more vivid impression than simply reading him. The little company of actors with big ambitions called Read more ...
David Nice
If, like me, chamber music isn’t your most frequent home, there are bound to be revelations of what for many are known masterpieces. Mine in recent years have involved Brahms, a composer I love more the older I get: the Second, A major, Piano Quartet, much less often heard than No. 1, at the 2018 Hatfield House Chamber Music Festival, and, last Friday, his First String Quartet from the Cuarteto Casals, also new to me, in an airy room looking out on Dublin’s Glasnevin Botanic Gardens.I missed the first two concerts of this year’s DICMF, arriving on the Friday, but both were greeted with Read more ...