A Small White Cloud Drifts Over Ireland - Seoirse Bodley

Embers - Raymond Deane

Cello Concerto No 2 - Herbert

Irish Symphony - Stanford

If concert programming were merely a matter of finding and sequencing individually interesting works, then Friday's pre-St Patrick's Day concert from the NSO would have been a first-rate attraction. But there needs to be a special something in one of the pieces or in their combination which Friday's offerings lacked. The concert, as in so many all-Irish programmes in the past, seemed to attract only listeners already seriously committed.

This was a pity, because the three little-known works of the first-half found conductor Colman Pearce in the best form I've heard him in for years. Seoirse Bodley's A Small White Cloud Drifts over Ireland, first heard in 1976, is a meeting place of past, present and future in the composer's style. Gestures of the avant-garde, traditional Irish music (not actually traditional at all, but newly composed), and plainer tonal chords circulate and cohabit uneasily, as if in an unstable solution. The unusual mixture has about it an uncomfortable bad-dream bluntness from which, in Bodley's later output, it has been the tonal material which has come to dominate.

Raymond Deane's Embers, a 1981 orchestration of a 1973 string quartet, is also unstable. It moves as if with a lagging limb, the trailing line of the double basses adding to the music's haunting, pseudominimalist recursiveness, before an end that sidesteps into inconclusiveness. There has been speculation that Dublin-born Victor Herbert's Second Cello Concerto helped Dvorak decide to write a cello concerto of his own. It's interesting, even now, to hear what may have been the seeds of some of Dvorak's ideas, but there's no doubting which is the superior work. The more symphonic Herbert's writing becomes, the more difficulty he has knitting his material together in a consequential way. When he lets the melody flow, as in the slow movement, he's far more successful.

Emma-Jane Murphy, currently principal cellist of the Australian Chamber Orchestra, performed with effortless musical poise, and the NSO's accompaniment under Colman Pearce, was beautifully balanced to match.

Sadly, the playing standard dropped after the interval, and the Hiberno-Brahmsian expanses of Charles Villiers Stanford's best-known symphony, No. 3 (the Irish, of 1887), turned out to be the least successful item in this unusual programme.