Massey, RTÉ Cór na nÓg, RTÉ NSO/Maloney

NCH, Dublin

Each December, selected members of the European Broadcasting Union combine their efforts in a marathon radio concert,

Christmas Around Europe

. This year’s compendium includes chamber music from Vienna, Handel and Haydn from Helsinki, a big band from Bucharest, and the Estonian National Men’s Chorus singing carols from Tallinn. Warsaw, Prague and Nuremberg are respectively contributing festive Renaissance polyphony, baroque instrumental music and some newly discovered 17th-century Christmas cantatas.

RTÉ's hour-long segment was pre-recorded at the National Concert Hall this week by mezzo-soprano Victoria Massey, the 60 choristers of Cór na nÓg, and the National Symphony Orchestra. (That's not to mention the audience, who lent their lunchtime voices to David Willcocks's indestructible arrangement of O Come, All Ye Faithful.)

With steady tone and unequivocal diction, Cór na nÓg firmly engaged with John Rutter's Donkey Carol, as if its crooked five-four time was the most natural rhythm imaginable. Outdoing even Rutter for seasonal sweetness was Michael Casey's three-sugars orchestration of Away in a Manger,where choir director Máire Mannion's training had copper-fastened the multilayered vocal textures. It would have been a good thing to hear more not only of Cór na nÓg but also of Massey, who brought silvery sparkle to Bereite dich, Zion,from Bach's Christmas Oratorio, and, by way of a stocking-filler, Grieg's Jeg elsker Dig(I love you), here substituting the German translation of Hans Christian Andersen's Danish text. Conductor Gavin Maloney shaped Bach's obbligato line into a peculiar mixture of nuances and serrations, and treated Grieg's lyrical accompaniment perhaps a little too epically.

But listeners to the Euroradio broadcast will doubtless be struck by Maloney's confident handling of the larger-scale items, particularly the big-hearted gestures of Tchaikovsky's Sleeping BeautySuite and the crackling passage-work of Tumblers' Dance, from Rimsky-Korsakov's Snow Maiden.