"What price is society prepared to pay in terms of how many people it sends to prison?" The spotlight on a hospital gurney and drip - indicative of Zahid Mubarek's last moments alive - provided a savage reminder of a teenager bludgeoned to death by his cellmate. Ellis's witty introductions give pointers: "Backwards Voyager" is presented as a song about how it feels "when even the old lady down the shop" tells you what to go and do with yourself; later, "Deep Waters" is about how it feels when your loved one moves to a different country and you have to follow them.The lingering impressions are of vast distance and space, bold departures and sad farewells.. Where these rested on vigorous punk-rustic dynamics of tension and impulsive release, Ocean Songs sustained a similar pace throughout, plunging into a mood of melancholia and capturing vivid feelings of being adrift in empathic strokes of the violin. What astonishes about the album, though, is the amount of shapes and shades that Ellis and his bandmates, the guitarist Mick Turner and drummer Jim White (augmented tonight by Nick Cave on gently ululating piano), find within its sighing spaces.What are the songs about? Tough to say, but they operate in the gap between Ellis's expressive playing and Turner and White's spare-to-crashing backdrops, poised between abstracts and specifics. On its release in 1998, Ocean Songs seemed to capitalise on a then-rising wave of so-called "post-rock" bands (Mogwai, Godspeed You! Black Emperor), crystallising the Three's reputation as purveyors of magnificently dolorous, sprawling song-sketches. It makes more sense, though, to see the Dirty Three as pioneers in their own world, given that the album built on and departed from a template set by their three previous works. If the grandly emotive results had an odour, though, they would be salty and lingering, capable of inducing seasickness through choppy waves of evocative images. According to the trio's devilishly charismatic violinist-cum-mainman, Warren Ellis, the Three's fourth album was recorded "in the last century, in a room that smelt of piss".
As triumphant new ideas in a year of gigs go, the recent Don't Look Back series takes the trophy. The remit that various underground rock acts play one of their key albums in full has seen some near-neglected gems duly resurrected: Dinosaur Jr's You're Living All Over Me, say, or the Lemonheads' It's a Shame About Ray. All great stuff, although none of the albums aired has boasted a title as apt as that of the series closer, Ocean Songs, by the eye-of-the-storm Australian instrumentalists the Dirty Three. Among the four encores demanded, his account of Grieg's Notturno from the fifth book of Lyric Pieces held us breathless.Recital to be broadcast on BBC Radio 3 at 2pm on Sunday 20 November. Hough's slightly hectic account of the later pages of Ravel's "Alborada del graciosa" from Mirroirs was the only moment when he sounded under technical pressure.Minutes later he was rattling off the equally fiendish machine-gun note repetitions of Moritz Moszkowski's outrageously over-the-top Caprice Espagnole with irresistible crispness and fire. Hough's account of Debussy's Spanish-style prelude "La s?nade interrompue" and "La Soir?dans Grenade" from Estampes brought some of the subtlest contrasts of touch and colour of the evening.He preceded these with two movements from that fount of pianistic impressionism, Albeniz's Iberia, the sultry "Evocaci?that opens the set and the pungent "Triana" from Book II, unfazed by their most elaborate demands.
Was there, for once, a touch of self-consciousness in the way Hough teased the opening waltz rhythms instead of allowing them to generate their own swing? No matter; things were soon flowing, though this was a fairly brisk, brightly lit account compared with the likes of Sviatoslav Richter. The second half shifted to Spain, though, as Hough wrote in his programme note, the charming sequence of Valses Poeticos by Enrique Granados was modelled on Schubert, while connections could be drawn between Berg's and Debussy's use of the whole-tone scale. The first half located itself in Vienna, opening with a clearly contoured account of Alban Berg's one-movement Piano Sonata, Op 1. Thence from fin-de-si?e twilight to the Biedermeier sunshine of Schubert at his most ineffably radiant in the late Sonata in G D894. There was nothing indulgent about Hough himself; rather, an unshowy intentness at the keyboard and a positive disinclination to milk applause.
