RTÉ NSO/Rophé

Walker NCH, Dublin

THE RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra opened its celebration of the 1920s with Milhaud's La Création du Monde, one of the greatest of jazz-inspired works. This was premiered by the Swedish Ballet Company in 1923, has an Africa-inspired scenario of the creation of the world by Blaise Cendrars, and was first seen with designs by Fernand Léger and choreography by Jean Börlin.

It’s not actually an orchestral piece, but a work for a large ensemble of soloists in which, as the composer put it, he “made wholesale use of the jazz style to convey a purely classical feeling”. It’s the tension between these two musical worlds that makes the hauntingly multi-layered music work so well, though the NSO’s performance under Pascal Rophé was rhythmically a little stiff.

Rophé was a much more grounded guide to the array of manners in Honegger's oratorio Le Roi David. The oratorio was created out of the incidental music for a biblical play by René Morax, who provided the linking narration delivered in gripping style by Eric Génovèse.

Avoiding a sense of bittiness in performance is a real challenge. Rophé surmounted this by yielding to whatever direction the music wanted to take. Honegger was a master of gesture, and Rophé invested every moment with real character. Sadly, he was let down by the variability of his soprano soloist, Karen Vourc’h. But her colleagues, alto Elodie Méchain and tenor Robin Tritschler were gripping.

On Tuesday the orchestra presented a portrait concert of English composer Piers Hellawell, who’s been based in Belfast since 1981, but was here getting a first airing from the NSO.

Hellawell, whose Memorial Cairns(1992), Degrees of Separation(2003-4) and Agricolas(2008), were conducted by Garry Walker, has mastered the challenge of writing music that sounds familiar yet new, and he has a command of striking gesture. But passages that were thinly scored – he likes rewarding orchestras with chamber-music moments – were rarely persuasive. The strongest sense of trajectory was achieved in Degrees of Separationfor strings. But better still was Agricolas, where the presence of Robert Plane as clarinet soloist provided the strongest sense of focus.