NCC/Hillier Smock Alley Theatre, Dublin

REVIEW: Janequin– Le chant des oiseaux. Poulenc– Sept chansons. Debussy– Trois chansons. Janequin– La guerre. Poulenc– Chansons françaises(exc).

Artistic director and conductor Paul Hillier confined his programme for this National Chamber Choir mini-tour (Navan, Carlingford, Dublin) to familiar music. Entitled “Love, Birds and War – An Evening of French Music”, it presented Janequin’s two best-known madrigals, Debussy’s only mature pieces for choir, and two of Poulenc’s well-known sets.

Hillier generally encouraged a fuller, heavier sound from his singers akin more to chamber choirs like the BBC Singers than ones that prioritise lightness and clarity like The Sixteen or the New London Chamber Choir, to cite comparisons from his native England.

It’s an approach that had its drawbacks in this programme, for instance piling up layers at the expense of independent line in the two Renaissance madrigals. There was also a cost in the 20th century pieces, with a loss of delicacy in parts of the Poulenc and in the love song that opens the Debussy set.

There was, too, an element of reserve in the response to text, with Hillier holding something back, for example, in poet Paul Éluard's utterly unreserved passion for women in Poulenc's setting of "Par une nuit nouvelle", in the bitter indictment of winter as "a villain" in the Debussy, and in the celebration of war's end in the last of Poulenc's 1945 set, Chansons françaises.

That said, it was this latter set that otherwise showed Hillier and choir at their best, responding with animation and humour to the charm and earthiness of the original folk songs appropriated by Poulenc.

Also effective was the slow second piece in the Debussy featuring a trace of melancholy in alto Áine Mulvey’s fine solo above the bass line’s gentle pattern of tumbling fa-la’s.