Bill Whelan and guests

RTÉ CO/Brophy NCH, Dublin

Some will recall that Ireland took the 1994 Eurovision prize with

Rock’n’Roll Kids

, but the de facto winner of that particular song contest was surely a dance. Nor, 16 years later, would luck seem to be running out for

Riverdance

, that luckiest of Bill Whelan’s inspirations. The smash-hit show it spawned has now been playing to worldwide audiences for longer than did the most prominent of Eurovision victors,

Abba

.

Whelan must be one of the few people in the wordy world of popular music ever to have had a big say purely in the language of notes. He describes his secret simply as “taking trad music, working it in with the orchestra, and giving it a new twist”.

The Seville Suiteand Riverdancehave sounded subtler than they did in Friday's muscular performances by the RTÉ Concert Orchestra under principal conductor David Brophy. Amplification funnelled the timbres, and spelled danger for the solo string tuning.

That couldn’t deter the likes of Declan Masterson on uilleann pipes or Mel Mercier on bodhrán, yet the evening’s abiding impressions were of the ultra graceful Flamenco dancing of Yolanda Gonzalez and the foot-weaving wizardry of Irish dancer Mick Donegan.

Vocalist Morgan Crowley provided a nifty counterpoint of scat-singing in An Chistin, and duetted with Julie Feeney for the most persuasive song on the programme, a lilting treatment of Michael Hartnett's Dán do Lara.

Whelan acknowledged the interpretive problems posed by two further songs, and both his own rendition of Hymn to a Broken Marriageand Feeney's of Woman of the Housesuggested that those problems have yet to be entirely solved. It was thus the refreshing Inishlacken, featuring Zoë Conway on fiddle and Mia Cooper on violin, that best exemplified the current direction of Whelan's work.