National Chamber Choir/Colin Mawby

The National Chamber Choir's "Composers Under the Influence" series continued last Thursday evening at the National Gallery. It featured the music of Eibhlis Farrell and of composers who have influenced her.

Her choral writing owes much to the dramatised sonorities and text setting of the early Baroque, as well as the 20th century. O rubor sanguinis mingles the sensuous harmonic gestures of Gesualdo's five-part setting of O vos omnes, and the rhetorical panache of Montverdi's Lasciate mi morire, with the calculated repetitions of Stravinsky's Ave Maria. The vigorous textures of her Exaudi voces bear comparison with the almost-wild polyphony of Philips's Cantatibus organis.

Yet there is nothing derivative about Farrell's reworking of these concepts. The choral writing is accomplished in technique, and in its use of gesture to convey a text. These comparisons might have been even more telling if the concert had featured more than just two of her works. Influences outnumbered her by more than three to one; and much of the programme was already in the NCC's repertoire.

Andrew Synott was a good accompanist on the harpsichord, though in Frescobaldi's Aria detta balletto - his only solo - the playing was too steady for this almost-impetuous music. The NCC's singing was far more convincing in 20th-century music than in early music, where Colin Mawby's conducting emphasised line at the expense of text-inspired gesture. One highlight was The Prayer, by the Slovakian composer Iris Szeghy (b. 1956). Another was Eibhlis Farrell's O rubor sanguinis which came across authoritatively.