Geis/Aileen Hynes

Geis is a new female choir, formed last February. Its inaugural concert, at the Bank of Ireland Arts Centre last Wednesday lunchtime, suggested that it could develop quite a reputation.

Discipline was one of this concert's strengths. Twenty-four young women, uniformly clad in elegant blue dresses, sang their programme of 11 pieces from memory, kept their eyes glued on the conductor, and stood stock still. The singing had a corresponding unanimity, for everyone knew what they were supposed to do - thanks to Aileen Hynes's firm direction - and even though the results were not always highly polished, the singing was unfailingly purposeful.

Morley's Now Is The Month Of Maying and Carl Hardebeck's arrangement of An Chuileann showed that Geis's accuracy of pitch could slip without the support of Celine Kelly's piano playing. This was especially due to the lower voices, which were also a bit less agile than the upper sections.

The standard fare offered in this concert - character-piece arrangements of folk songs and well-known melodies, plus a few madrigal-style pieces - is a reasonable way for a choir of this type to launch itself. I hope that in the longer term Geis will explore more artistically rewarding repertoires, such as accompanied partsongs by Schubert and Brahms. It has the technique and discipline to do so.