Ireland
David Nice
A drawback of choosing relatively or very obscure operas, as they've been mostly doing in Wexford Festival since 1951, is that the audiences probably won’t come out humming the tunes. That changed this year with the inclusion of Le trouvère, which most of us know – minus the ballet music and a few striking changes in this French version – as Il trovatore. A risk, since budget forbade big names in the four main roles, but the casting yielded unexpected treasures.I'd go so far as to say a star is born in soprano Lydia Grindatto, taking on what notewise is the most demanding of them all, 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 ...
Veronica Lee
The Irish diaspora in London were out in force for Emma Doran’s appearance at Leicester Square Theatre. Her online work and her appearance on Amazon Prime Video's LOL: Last One Laughing Ireland has gained her a huge fanbase in Ireland and beyond – although she did ask if the English in the room had been dragged along by an Irish pal. In truth, they were probably fans anyway – and would surely have been at the gig’s end.Doran is energetic and warm-hearted, but there’s a steeliness about her, too, and occasionally some of her very frank material pushes the envelope, taste-wise. Mostly Read more ...
David Nice
High on the hill of fascinating New Ross in County Wexford sits its greatest treasure, the ruined 13th century Gothic beauty of St Mary’s. Unless you come at it from the east, its glories are concealed behind the working church which completes it and takes the place of the old nave, built in 1813 and “improved” twice later that century.Plain and spacious inside, with a few military memorials on the wall, the acoustics of its shoebox shape (think a smaller Musikvereinsaal without the trimmings) are perfect, as pianists great and less well-known have attested over the 19 years of the stunningly Read more ...
David Nice
Why are the Irish such good storytellers? The historical perspective is that the oral tradition goes way, way back, allied to the gift of the gab. On the psychological level, is it partly an evasion, an escape from telling the truth about oneself? The transition from fantasy to honesty in Conor McPherson’s first play of 1997, so much better than his latest, suggests as much.This new staging of a long-running hit, directed, like that well-acted disappointment The Brightening Air, by the playwright, sustains the atmosphere of curious meetings in a rural Irish pub saloon (perfectly designed by Read more ...
Gary Naylor
If you ever wanted to know what a mash up of Martin McDonagh and Conor McPherson, stirred (and there’s a lot of stirring in this play) with a soupçon of Chekhov, Ibsen and Williams looks like, The Kiln has your answer.Mark O’Rowe’s feuding family fallouts were a big hit at the Galway International Arts Festival last summer and the play has transferred seamlessly to London, fetching up in a house perfectly suited to its forced intimacy. It’s only after you see scaled up productions lose the run of what sent them on to greater things that you realise how much size matters. We’re on a Read more ...
How to be a Dancer in 72,000 Easy Lessons, Teaċ Daṁsa review - a riveting account of a life in dance
Jenny Gilbert
Anyone who has followed the trajectory of choreographer-director Michael Keegan-Dolan and his West Kerry-based company Teaċ Daṁsa (House of Dance) will know by now to expect the unexpected. Such as a Swan Lake whose storyline, in part a searing attack on the abuses of the Catholic church, bore so little resemblance to the original that you might think you’d come to the wrong theatre until the spectacular finale seen through a blizzard of white feathers.His staging of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring (a co-production with English National Opera) is up there with the finest, pitting Irish hare Read more ...
Graham Fuller
With their second album Altar, the Irish combo NewDad has moved from the love-embittered shoegaze of their 2023 debut Madra toward a worldlier perspective married to a comparatively sophisticated but confrontational style. Some reviewers have suggested it’s poppier, but tunes like "Other Side" (with its deceptively quiet start), “Misery”, “Puzzle”, and “Mr. Cold Embrace” are happily closer to post-punk. Nice and angsty does it every time in my book.It’s still shoegazey, still rueful, but the music made by Julie Dawson (vocals, rhythm guitar), Sean O’Dowd (lead guitar), and Fiachra Parslow ( Read more ...
David Nice
Many Londoners would already have experienced the musicality incarnate of Peter Whelan and his Irish Baroque Orchestra. A smaller ensemble rocked two of Irish National Opera’s Vivaldi specials in the Linbury Theatre – one a major award winner – and the best Messiah I’ve ever heard in the Wigmore Hall. Their first Prom was pure celebration, and how they filled the Royal Albert Hall, both collectively and solo-wise, in the revised Dublin version of Alexander’s Feast.Surprisingly, this is only the second ensemble from the Republic of Ireland to visit the Proms; I was in the Arena 46 years ago ( Read more ...
Kathryn Reilly
Queen of the earworm Ciara Mary-Alice Thompson has had quite the summer, capturing imaginations and sparking indignation. The brazen hussy has the audacity to wear what the hell she likes while belting out her stream of catchy country-pop, life-affirming hits. She’s in your face, unapologetic and going absolutely nowhere.Little surprise, then, that in doing so she has incurred the wrath of a multitude keyboard warriors. The BBC has had to turn off live commenting during some of her festival performances. The woman has had the temerity to not follow the narrative, and not to shape herself to Read more ...
David Nice
The craft heads to Mars, the music remains below on earth. Which is partly intentional: composer Jennifer Walshe tells us she listened to “synth heavy music” uploaded by astronauts (“a lot of Mike Oldfield and Vangelis”), so we veer from pop to sound-effects, some good (the sparkler held close to a microphone), some ordinary (a chain thrown to the ground sounds exactly like that). It’s a well-executed whole, though, and will be a hit whatever I write about it.If you witnessed Walshe's The Site of an Investigation at the 2022 Proms, you'll know what to expect. Maybe, though, it Read more ...
James Mellen
Cian Ducrot cut his teeth on a blend of intimate singer-songwriter balladry and lowkey alt-pop, most of his debut album Victory sounding like a less personable Lewis Capaldi. There’s a modernity to Ducrot’s sound, though. The palette is spotless, bordering on the sterile, his solid vocal performances the key, and perhaps only, selling point of his music. New album Little Dreaming takes this to the extreme: opener “It’s Cian Bitch” is half bastardised turn of the millennium French disco-house, half Fleetwood Mac pastiche, all wrapped up in a lifeless bow. Little Dreaming is Read more ...