National Chamber Choir/Colin Mawby

THE National Chamber Choir's composition workshop is in its fourth year and it has again given a welcome opportunity to the pupils in our schools to exercise their musical talents.

The choir visited 26 schools, 18 of them in the Dublin area, and received over 100 compositions, of which 17 were chosen for Monday's concert in the NCH John Field Room.

This year some of the pieces had instrumental accompaniments, usually piano, as in Frances Mitchell's lissa in Requiem Puemrum, an expressionistic setting of a short liturgical text, or as in Narita Ahern's Journey Through Life, which added timpani, double bass, rain stick and panpipes to the piano in an ambitious attempt to add extra colour to the choir.

Despite this experimentation, my general impression was that the music making was less adventurous than last year's.

Jennifer Kelly was awarded the Gerald Victory Memorial Commission for her setting of Keats's Faery Song. She displayed a good sense of phrasing and a rhythmic elan which kept the music on the move in spite of its generally slow tempo, and the adjudicators felt that she would be best able to carry out the commission of a new work for the choir.

Caoimhe Ni Ainle was highly commended for her witty setting of Daddy fell into the pond. Another witty setting was The Tonic Song by Nicky Fielding, the only boy represented in the concert. He not only made excellent use of the musical device of the canon but, in his text, commented on his own musical procedures.

Alison Thomas played some piano pieces by the young Mozart, the young Chopin and the young Richard Rodney Bennet.