Music Now: Seoirse Bodley, National Concert Hall

BOTH the evening and lunchtime concerts in the NCR last Friday contained works by Seoirse Bodley, representing 20 years of his music.

The earliest work dates from 1976 and in it he introduces his individual mixture of the idioms of Irish traditional music and the structural procedures of Central European music of this century. A Small White Cloud Drifts Over Ireland is a colourful work and, performed by the NSO under Kasper de Roo, it kept one's attention, but the composer's intention that "the conflicts should be integrated into a larger picture" was not fulfilled, could not be fulfilled. The music lurches from one traditional cliche to another in a way that sounds like a mixture of Hindemith and The Chieftains, a marriage never made in heaven.

The Trio for Flute, Violin and Piano dates from 1986 and is another example of Bodley's laudable but misguided attempt to bring Irish traditional music into the classical realm. It was performed by members of Concorde in the John Field Room. A small ensemble cannot be as colourful as a full orchestra and the Trio, which lasted for more than 30 minutes and relied more heavily on Irish-type tunes than A Small White Cloud, seemed overlong to me.

Concorde also gave the first performance of Pax Bellumque (1997) for Soprano, Flute, Clarinet, Violin and Piano. This was a setting of two poems about the Great War. The first, by Wilfred Owen, rubbed one's nose in the squalor; the second, by Thomas MacGreevy, aestheticised it. Bodley attempts to link these two approaches with an ascetically pared down music which is basically at odds with the content of the words.

The orchestral concert ended with Shostakovich's Symphony No. 6, a characteristic combination of gloom and hectic merriment; more stimulating was Dimitri Alexeiev's vigorous account of Prokofiev's Piano Concerto No. 3.