RTÉ NSO/Sheil

NCH, Dublin

Forbidding, lugubrious and indeterminate, David Fennessy’s RTÉ-commissioned orchestral essay Bodies received its second performance in this week’s RTÉ Horizons concert at the National Concert Hall – and puzzled me a second time.

The mystery isn’t in the music alone, but in the way it might confound the expectations you get from reading the Maynooth-born composer’s programme note.

It was all alone, in a Hong Kong hotel room, that Fennessy was first struck by an idea for Bodies,leading him to the concept of "a kind of liturgy [about] feelings of connection [with] an unseen congregation". While that may have been the formula for a musical depiction of teeming humanity, the finished composition has ideas of its own.

A “mass of voices” proceeding from numberless bodies seems to find representation in an extended, cluster-laden quotation from the Agnus Dei of Bach’s Mass in B minor – an allusion, perhaps, to the Body of Christ? And the jittery one-note fanfares, sustained by on- and off-stage brass, suggest to me echoes from some ancient battlefield – albeit one strewn, of course, with bodies.

Fennessy describes his moment of inspiration as "a strange experience", and Bodies is certainly that. Yet the realisation of his extra-musical agenda seemed all the more cryptic after the vivid tone-painting of his teacher James MacMillan's . . . as others see us . . .(1990).

Conductor Fergus Sheil and nine members of the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra brought out the wealth of wit and colour in these engaging sound-images of six illustrious sitters (from Henry VIII to Dorothy Hodgkin) whose pictures now hang in London’s National Portrait Gallery.

MacMillan’s online guide, together with projections of the relevant paintings, made this performance all the better to appreciate. Between concept and composition, the connections were abundantly clear.