THE Goethe Institute Choir's Christmas Concert at the National Concert Hall was unusual in a number of ways. It's not often, for instance, that one of Dublin's amateur choirs gets to sing a major work at the NCH in partnership with an amateur orchestra.
In Beethoven's Mass in C, the choir was joined by the Hibernian Chamber Orchestra under its conductor, John Finucane, for a performance which sustained a feeling of what you might call agreeable musicianliness. Not everything fell correctly into place, but you could always sense a musicianly intelligence guiding the scaling and shaping of the music making.
This was true of both choir and orchestra, and unusually, the choral singers seemed fully as interested in moments of introspection as in those where they were called on to sing out. Overall, the performance was at its best in the Kyrie and Gloria; there was an increased incidence in the later sections of passages which sounded rather heavy weatherish.
The line up of vocal soloists included the soprano Orla Boylan, handling her large voice with perceptible restraint and sensitive stylistic accommodation to the music. The mezzo soprano Aylish Kerrigan induced in me a sort of musical vertigo shed showed not so much a voice as different voices in the different parts of her range, and the vowels she produced were hard to relate to the words she sang.
Anthony Kearns delivered an easeful, clear and musical tenor line, not always true in intonation, but certainly sounding like a singer to watch out for. And Aran Maree bottomed out the quartet in a rather more forceful style.
The second half opened with some pieces from the choir on its own (conducted by its director, Cait Cooper), a romantic romp through Handel by Guilmant (delivered by the organist Gerard Gillen) and Tomas O Suilleabhain's unostentatious Aifreann na Gine.
The major work was a new piece by Seoirse Bodley, Fraw Musica, which the composer translates as Madam Music. This was written for the Johann Walter Kantorei of Torgau in Germany, to commemorate the death of Martin Luther 450 years ago and the birth of his close friend Johann Walter, Kantor of Torgau, 500 years ago. The piece, which sets texts by the two men it commemorates, was premiered in Germany in October and 36 members of the German choir travelled to Dublin to take part in the first Irish performance, which was conducted by the composer.
The nine movement piece, for mezzo soprano, choir, organ and chamber orchestra, is intentionally simple. There are only a few excursions away from a style which depends heavily on softly cushioned dissonances, employed in a way that creates little sense of directional tension. As with other pieces the composer chose to cast in this pattern of juxtaposed greys allied to conventional gestures of word painting (for instance, parts of his Third Symphony, Ceol), I found the effect cumulatively bland.
