REVIEWS

Robinson, Raschèr Saxophone Quartet NCC/Woodat the National Gallery, Dublin.

Bach - Lobet den Herrn

Erkki-Sven Tüür - Meditatio

Erland von Koch - Miniatures

Bernd Franke - On the Dignity of Man

The last of the National Chamber Choir's Baltic Blues concerts, given at the National Gallery on Thursday, was an evening of contrasts.

There were the internal contrasts within the programme itself, Bach juxtaposed with works composed in the last few years. And there was the contrast between the vitality of the performances and the programming tiredness of the point-stretching inclusion of German composers born hundreds of miles from the sea.

James Wood approached Bach's Lobet den Herrn, in which the choir was buttressed by Andrew Robinson on viola da gamba, with a kind of brittle vitality.

There were instrumental contributions, too, to the new works. The Meditatioof 2003 by Estonian Erkki-Sven Tüür sets a wordy Latin text by St Anselm of Canterbury. The piece explores the quiet vocal aspects of a saxophone quartet, allowing the players of the Raschèr Saxophone Quartet to blend in almost imperceptibly with the choir, and also exploited the instruments' more familiar flourishes.

For Bernd Franke's On the Dignity of Man, first heard in Dresden in 2005, the quartet played from behind the audience, functioning as interrupters of and commentators on Giovanni Pico della Mirandola's 15th-century text. The piece's best moment was the slow vocal descent at the end, which seemed to suggest a greater reality for brutishness than for man's potential for anything divine.

In its quiet and mostly conservative way, Swedish composer Erland van Koch's set of 1970 Miniaturesfor saxophone quartet made a clearer impression than either of the new works, especially in the lively Rondo giocoso which ends the piece.

Michael Dervan