A moveable musical feast fails to sound the right note

The wet Irish summer, poor acoustics and cramped seating combined to turn the Limerick International Music Festival into a disappointing experience, writes MICHAEL DERVAN.

THE IRISH CHAMBER Orchestra’s MBNA Limerick International Music Festival has had its fair share of chopping and changing over the years. That’s to be expected. The festival’s artistic direction changes every time the orchestra itself gets a new artistic director, and the current director, Anthony Marwood, is the third since the festival began in 1996. But there have been much bigger changes, too. The festival began life at St Flannan’s Cathedral in Killaloe, a setting blessed with atmosphere but beset with acoustic problems for performers and listeners alike. In 2004 the festival changed its name and moved into Limerick city, becoming the Shannon International Music Festival (later with MBNA as title sponsor), and basing itself in St Mary’s Cathedral, where the sound was better, the capacity greater, and the University Concert Hall was just up the road if needed.

This year brought yet another change of name and venue. The festival has moved right into the centre of Limerick, into the 19th-century interior of the former Franciscan Church on Henry Street, where a four-column portico announces its presence by jutting out on to the public pavement. In this wet Irish summer it usefully provided a modicum of outdoor shelter from some exceedingly heavy rain showers.

As a music venue, however, the church failed in its first outing on a number of fronts. The acoustic is poor. The sound is swimmy and unfocused, and the general effect is an unusual lack of immediacy. It’s as if everything that’s played or sung is coming from a place far more distant than the actual stage. It’s not as if the ICO hadn’t carried out work in advance in an effort to ensure that the sound would be adequate. There were acoustic panels ranged behind the specially erected stage, and on either side of it, in an attempt to contain and reflect the sound. And there were sound-absorbing baffles hung from the ceiling in the aisles. But not only was the music blurry, but safety announcements and spoken introductions from the stage were largely indecipherable until the final night, when a microphone was used.

The misfortunes of the festival extended beyond the weather and the acoustic. The seating proved to be among the most cramped and uncomfortable I’ve ever endured, the sound of emergency vehicles outside penetrated at periodic intervals, Boris Hunka’s programme notes included a ridiculous amount of misleading and inaccurate information, and the church’s colour scheme has to be seen to be believed.

Well, then, what of the actual musical content? In two separate concerts, the ICO's artistic director, Anthony Marwood, played violin concertos by Mozart, Vivaldi and Weill. Mozart's Concerto in G, and Vivaldi's Concerto in E flat ( La tempesta di mare) came in a programme titled "Storms in the Night," where, beyond the Vivaldi, there was a juvenile storm from Rossini (the amusing finale to his String Sonata No. 6), a nocturnal mood piece, The Moonby Elaine Agnew, inspired by The Song of Wandering Aengus, and a double whammy in Haydn's Symphony No. 8 ( Le Soir), which also ends with a storm.

The actual storm movements worked well, the confusion of the acoustic adding to the sense of disruptive force, and the inconclusive delicacy of the Agnew was effective, too, being too quiet to trigger the worst effects of the acoustic. Marwood sounded altogether more at ease in the Vivaldi than in the Mozart, though in the closing concert he was put to the pin of his collar in Kurt Weill’s Concerto for Violin and Wind Orchestra.

This is early Weill (1924), written before the success of the Threepenny Operaor his time as a composer of Broadway musicals. It's a chalk and cheese kind of work with an apparent identity crisis. The violin and the wind instruments often seem to be at odds with one another, and the piece gives the impression of trying out styles like someone unsure what to wear to a wedding. It's an unbalanced work at the best of times. The wind instruments always tend to compromise the soloist. With Marwood directing as well as playing, the unkind acoustic invested his clearly gutsy but not always clearly audible performance with a heroic tinge.

The concerto was paired with Haydn's Harmoniemesse, for which the orchestra was joined by soloists Cara O'Sullivan (soprano), Carolyn Dobbin (mezzo soprano), Robin Tritschler (tenor) and Owen Gilhooly (baritone), the National Chamber Choir, and conducted by Paul Hillier. From where I sat the effect was of a kind of strangely glorious soup – something you knew was full of good ingredients, even if you couldn't make out the individual flavours very well.

The four singers had earlier appeared in a evening of Viennese Opera Classics, essentially Mozart and operetta, with some perfunctory piano solos (Mozart and Liszt) provided by the accompanist, Sophia Rahman.

The star of the evening was Robin Tritschler, who spun lyrical lines with stylish ease. Cara O’Sullivan (who introduced some of the pieces with personable wit, and also engaged in repartee with the audience about the difficulties of the acoustic), went rather over the top in operetta, but was finely controlled in Mozart.

The lunchtime recital by the young flautist Fiona Kelly, given with pianist Una Hunt, was an impressionistic affair – the impression being of a player with lots of agility and a generous colouristic resource.

But any finer points in her programme of Bozza, Dutilleux, Reinecke and Ian Clarke were compromised by acoustic smear. The all-female Limerick choir Seoda went through their late-night middlebrow programme with agreeable spirit, but I missed the second late-night offering, by Indian sarod-player Soumik Datta. The nearly three-hours of sitting at two earlier concerts meant that another painful bout on the pews was more than my body would bear.