NCC/Hillier

Kevin Barry Room, NCH, Dublin

Music from the Renaissance and 20th/21st centuries

Here Paul Hillier, the National Chamber Choir’s artistic director, juxtaposed old choral pieces from half a millennium ago with their young descendants from the past 100 years. His rich and intriguing selection was drawn from a deep knowledge of these two reper- toires.

There were factors in the performance he would probably want to have back, such as the absence of any give in the Kevin Barry Room’s arid acoustic. Also, there was not always stylistic agreement between his voices, especially the tenors whose mixture of vibrato and straighter singing undermined the line’s blend and therefore that of the choir.

These issues hit hardest in the renaissance music. You longed for purity and a little ecclesiastical resonance in two settings by Dufay of Ave Regina, intended for performance at his deathbed and sweetly interspersed with brief personal petitions ("Miserere supplicanti Dufay . . .").

Other early pieces included chansons by Josquin and a 15th-century German song in both its original setting and one by Schoenberg.

The newer music included the European premiere of Credo/Ani Ma'aminby the Israeli-American Shulamit Ran. It's an intense and atmospheric exploration of faith in the face of atrocity, combining ancient texts with spoken Holocaust testimonies and an eye-witness reflection from the 2001 World Trade Center attack.

The idea of atrocity was also explored in the macabre humour of Kurt Weill's setting of Brecht's anti-war Die Legende von toten Soldatenand in the sorrowing of Gorecki's Songs of Rodziny Katynskiefor the 20,000 Polish officers slaughtered by the Nazis in Katyn in 1940.

Here, and in Louis Andriessen's Poulenc-like Un beau baiser, and in the choral speaking of Erik Bergman's wacky 1960 Four Gallows Songs, Hillier and choir were at their most persuasive.