O’Sullivan, Degani Ensemble

John Field Room, NCH, Dublin

Beethoven

– Scottish Folk Songs Op 108 (excs).

Shaun Davey

– The Joys of Mary.

Bernard Geary

– Three Reflections for Oboe and Piano.

Mozart

– Quintet in C minor K516b.

This programme of music from our time and from the classical period worked quite well as a sequence of works that are more high entertainment than high art. However, it was frustrating that there was no printed programme.

Two contemporary pieces lay at the centre of the concert. One of them was Shaun Davey's The Joys of Mary, for oboe quartet and soprano – a setting of the eponymous traditional carol that was performed with understated but shapely sensitivity by Cara O'Sullivan and the Degani Ensemble. Bernard Geary's Three Reflections for Oboe and Pianowas receiving its first performance. Its calculated contrasts of ideas, within and between movements, show a blend of lyricism and slightly spiky neoclassicism that suggest a work as pleasant to play as it is listen to.

The last piece in the concert was Mozart's Quintet in C minor K516b– the composer's arrangement for oboe and four strings of his String Quintet K406, which is in turn an arrangement of the Wind Serenade K388. A number of commentators have observed that, by the standards of other Mozart serenades, this music has an unusually serious tone.

Perhaps because of that it sat a little oddly with the rest of the programme, despite a performance that relished its many beauties.

The most complete and profoundly joyful music-making of the concert had come at the beginning, in five of Beethoven’s settings of Scottish folk songs. Scored for soprano and piano trio, and complicated enough for Beethoven’s publisher to complain that the piano parts were far too difficult for all but “a handful of young ladies to play”, these are miracles of refined drawing-room music. This performance had a blend of folksiness and high-art sophistication that felt just right.