Polyphonia/Blanaid Murphy

POLYPHONIA is a new professional vocal ensemble formed to perform music from the late Renaissance and early baroque period under the conductorship of Blanaid Murphy.

The group made its debut at St Audoen's Church on Saturday, when the first half of its programme was interspersed with organ pieces performed by Shane Brennan, director of the Schola Cantorum at St Finian's College in Mullingar.

Polyphonia's prospectuses performances using solo voices, one to a part", but the opening programme largely, and perhaps wisely, fought shy of this demanding ideal.

The concert began promisingly with stately rather solid performances of Byrd's Miserere and Emendemus In Melius. But later the performing potential expressed in these opening items was not exploited. There was some beautiful soft singing towards the end of the third Byrd piece of the evening, his Ave Verum, and the earliest piece on offer, Woefully Arrayed by William Cornysh (who died in 1523), carried an emotional charge that whetted the appetite for more.

But mostly Blanaid Murphy's conducting had a feeling of heavy dutifulness about it Victoria's O Vos Omnes, for instance, sounding leaden rather than grieving and the group suffered some disorienting shifts in pitch when negotiating major points of musical punctuation.