The Streets, Olympia Theatre, Dublin:Crisis? What crisis? The Streets main man Mike Skinner clearly has little time for matters of recession, budgets, cost-cutting, downsizing, job losses and all other manner of depressing topics.
Riding a few queasy waves of critical opprobrium, Skinner has been smart enough to circumvent creative stasis over the course of four albums by weaving into his original pirate garage material aspects of gospel, reggae, pop balladry and a type of earnest bloke-philosophy that can only be termed Zen Chavism. Hence, perhaps, the optimistic nature of this gig.
The fact that Skinner’s new-found ethos doesn’t really ring true is possibly not his fault. It isn’t that Skinner – dressed here in the simple, almost monkish garb of jeans and white T-shirt, his shaved head bobbing along to the music – isn’t good at what he does, but judging by tonight’s adulatory reception his audience clearly require more than life-coaching snippets from a guy who has previously espoused the undertaking of a rather more hedonistic lifestyle.
He starts with Everything is Borrowed, the title track from his latest album. Compared to the brittle garage of his earlier albums this is a svelte pop song, imbued with gospel and a sheen of talent.
Like that album, the gig is a curious mix: Skinner’s occasionally crude (but no less worthy) themes of karma and philosophy are often cast aside in favour of banal lyrics, platitudes and a few nods to audience expectations, such as a yawn-inducing jump into the audience off one of the theatre boxes.
Meanwhile, excellent modern-larks pop songs such as Dry Your Eyes and Fit But You Know It are dragged under by an approach that borders on the casually derisive.
He has said that the next album from The Streets will be the last, and that he will go on to pastures new.
Judging by the reaction of the audience (in a word, bonkers) that’s not, perhaps, a good idea. But Skinner seems a canny enough guy, and creatively it’s possibly the best idea he’s come up with in years.
Goethe-Institut Choir OSC/Wolff
St Ann’s Church, Dublin
MICHAEL DUNGAN
Bach– Cantatas 55, 48, 162, 5
Christoph Wolff is the world’s leading living Bach scholar. He is a renowned music professor at Harvard and a director of the Bach-Archiv in Leipzig.
However, as the conductor in Sunday’s annual resumption by the Orchestra of St Cecilia of its 10-year survey of the complete cantatas (now in its ninth year), Wolff’s outstanding intellectual appreciation of Bach did not translate into good performances. They were almost featureless, like a sculpture reduced from three dimensions to two in a photograph. All Bach’s wonderful notes were there, and you could enjoy them. But there was very little in the way of energy, of texture, or even insight, or of what baroque experts such as Wolff himself refer to as “the moving of the affections”.
The impression was of little being asked and little given. His tempos mostly felt right, but pulses were four-square and pedestrian, sometimes limp. It grew tiresome over the course of four cantatas.
There were a number of better moments, notably the solo singing and which ever of the obbligato instrumental solos that sat most comfortably with the players. These included the slide trumpet brightly joining with commanding bass soloist Nigel Williams to instruct Satan, “Be silent, you do not frighten me”, in Cantata No 5. The afternoon’s highlight was the intertwining of oboe and voice in a plaintive trio sonata as alto Alison Browner beseeched God to “spare my soul and make it pure” in Cantata No 48.
There wasn’t much work for the Goethe-Institut Choir, mostly chorales whose hymn-like textures they produced with a strong, four-part balance. But in the afternoon’s two big choruses they were punching above their weight, with the linear element of the opening movement of Cantata No 48 becoming woolly as the complexity grew. The second – “Where shall I flee?” in Cantata No 5 – worked rather better, with the basses and tenors making assertive interjections beneath a sweet soprano line singing the tune in long notes.
The Bach Cantatas series continues each Sunday at 3.30pm in St Ann’s Church until March 8
