Brandenburg Concertos 1, 3 & 5 - Bach

Circles - Eric Sweeney

Es ist genug - Denisov

The Irish Chamber Orchestra has earned itself a considerable reputation for its advocacy of contemporary Irish music and its adventurous policy of bringing music to towns and communities, small and remote, around the country.

Its exploration of the masterworks of the 19th century has not been as consistently sure-footed as its achievement in more recent work. And its treatment of earlier periods has been a lot more patchy in content and quality. So a move to cover the towering masterpieces that are Bach's Brandenburg Concertos would seem a most welcome development.

On Wednesday, the orchestra was faced with a double set of problems - the acoustic of St Flannan's Cathedral, and the failure of Fionnuala Hunt to keep these great works together, either musically, or, sometimes glaringly, in the straightforward matter of tightness of ensemble.

The cathedral acoustic muddies orchestral playing that isn't balanced with minute precision. The typical failure on Wednesday, most pronounced in the First and Third Concertos, was not of one line or orchestral section obliterating another, but of equal voices competing so that each rendered the other indecipherable. The golden rule that orchestral balancing must be based on ensuring the audibility of the acoustically weakest line is one that Hunt and the ICO need to remember.

Given that the technical potential of the ICO was as readily in evidence as ever, the Bach playing was a most frustrating experience. The lighter scoring of the Fifth Concerto removed many of the problems experienced in the first half, but exposed a whole range of stylistic issues that this orchestra has only resolved in 18th-century repertoire when working under specialist conductors like Nicholas McGegan and Nicholas Kraemer.

Eric Sweeney's Circles of 1985 is a strangely blunt work, offering a mixture of the simplistic and the gauche which remains resolutely unconvincing. Edison Denisov's roughly contemporaneous Es ist genug, based on the same Bach chorale that Berg used in his Violin Concerto, is a fine example of this Russian composer's conviction that "music more than anything else can shape man's spiritual world". The ICO's performance, with Joachim Roewer the sensitive viola soloist, was an oasis in an otherwise depressing evening.

The Aerfi Killaloe Music Festival runs until Sunday. Booking: 061-202583