Chamber Choir Ireland: Amhráin na Naomh – An unusually strained performance by an accomplished ensemble

Amhráin na Naomh

Chamber Choir Ireland, Irish Chamber Orchestra/Cormac McCarthy

All Hallows Chapel, Dublin City University

★★☆☆☆

It’s a couple of years since Chamber Choir Ireland started giving concerts at All Hallows Chapel in Drumcondra, which since 2016 has been part of Dublin City University. I got my first concert experience there on Wednesday, when the choir teamed up with the Irish Chamber Orchestra under the Cork musician Cormac McCarthy for a programme that included the first performance of Eoghan Desmond’s Amra Choluim Chille (Elegy for St Columba).

The chapel was designed in 1876 by the prolific Cork architect George Ashlin and is a visually pleasing venue for concerts, with the tiered pews facing each other on either side of the nave. On Wednesday it was welcomingly warm, though not as comfortable as a secular venue with seats or chairs. The acoustic is what you might call generous, although with a full house it was not as woolly as might have been expected.

Amra Choluim Chille contains many moments of gorgeously calculated choral texture, but the level of invention in Eoghan Demond’s new work is anything but consistent

The performance of Arvo Pärt’s Silouan’s Song showed limitations that would dog the evening’s performances. McCarthy describes himself as a “pianist, composer, arranger and conductor” who is “noted for a diverse stylistic palette, and equally at home in a variety of genres”. But on Wednesday his conducting was low on characterisation and precision, and altogether too generalised in its musical responses. It led the normally excellent playing of the Irish Chamber Orchestra (which also performed Pärt’s evocative Fratres in the version for strings and percussion) to sound flaccid, and the accomplished singers of Chamber Choir Ireland to sound unusually strained. The purely choral version of Sibelius’s Rakastava (The Lover) sounded especially inarticulate.

[ Eoghan Desmond: ‘I struggle to write in a vacuum – I draw inspiration from what I’m working on as a singer’ ]

The second half of the concert was given over to Amra Choluim Chille, the evening’s big work, for choir with soloists, strings, harp and percussion. It’s an extended, seven-movement setting of a sixth-century Irish text and is a curate’s egg of a work. Desmond is a performer and composer immersed in choral music (he was one of the basses in the performance), and his piece contains many moments of gorgeously calculated choral texture.

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His reputation is based on short works for a cappella voices. But the level of invention is this new work is anything but consistent. The orchestral writing leaves a lot to be desired, particularly the use of stale arpeggios on the harp and tremolo in the strings. The best movement is probably the last, which has an imposing opening for lower strings in an impressively funereal tone and also a splendid, full-throated climax. Sadly, however, on a first hearing this ambitious work was less than persuasive.

Chamber Choir Ireland perform their Amhráin na Naomh programme again, at St Mary’s Cathedral in Limerick, at 7.30pm today