Co Limerick Youth Choir, ICO Chorus, NCC, ICO/Martin

RDS, Dublin

Mozart – Symphony No 38 (Prague). Karl Jenkins – Stella Natalis

The Irish Chamber Orchestra’s final programme of 2011 presented the unusual juxtaposition of Mozart and Karl Jenkins. Spanish conductor Jaime Martin, making his ICO début, took an assertive approach to both composers.

The effect in Mozart’s

Prague

Symphony was at once stimulating and disconcerting. The stimulation came from the depth of detailed thought behind Martin’s music-making. The downside came from the fact that so many of the ideas resulted in the emphasis falling on secondary activity – drums, trumpets, inner parts – at the expense of leading material which needed to stand in the foreground. If ever there was a case of missing the forest for the trees, musically speaking, this was it.

Karl Jenkins, composer, jingle-writer, one time member of Soft Machine, is an interesting phenomenon in the world of classical music. His work, especially

The Armed Man: A Mass for Peace

, is hugely popular. Yet the classical establishment doesn’t rate his work highly.

It may seem like ivory-tower snootiness in the face of commercial success. But, in truth, it is no more that than is the art world’s inattention to the crying boys of Bragolin, or the failure of literary critics to write glowingly of Barbara Cartland.

Jenkins’s

Stella Natalis

, premièred two years ago, sets a range of Christmas-related texts (mostly by his wife, Carol Barratt, but also including an 16th-century English text, Psalm 121, some words in Zulu) in a choir-friendly style with lots of intentionally catchy moments, and prominent parts for agile trumpets and percussionists in an orchestra that is otherwise mostly used for background accompanimental patterning.

It is, pure and simple, a feelgood piece, safe and sure in its effects save for a tendency to go on rather longer than necessary. Saturday’s choral singers – the National Chamber Choir, the ICO Chorus, and the County Limerick Youth Choir – sang it with clear-toned enthusiasm.

Star of the evening for me, however, was neither the composer, the choir nor the orchestra. It was instead the German soprano Susanne Bernhard who married effortless coloratura and gorgeous tone. This was her Irish début. Here’s hoping she comes back soon.