Poulenc Panorama

Reamonn Keary's Poulenc Panorama reached its penultimate instalment at the John Field Room on Tuesday. The programme included the Flute Sonata and five songs, plus works by Falla (Psyche), Debussy (the Sonata for flute, viola and harp), Koechlin (the Sonata Primavera) and Fergus Johnston (Kaleidophone), this last, we were told, in view of the composer's imminent 40th birthday.

The major piece among these is the Debussy, one of the three completed sonatas in a series the composer did not live to complete. It's a more elusive piece than its companions (one each for violin and cello with piano), and difficult for performers to balance, both acoustically and musically.

Tuesday's performance, by William Dowdall, Adele Govier and Andreja Malir, partook of the general understatement of the evening's music-making and yielded many fine moments without conveying a fully satisfying whole.

Mezzo soprano Colette McGahon did not sound in good voice in either the Poulenc songs (accompanied by Reamonn Keary), or Falla's Psyche (with an ensemble of flute, strings and harp), having none of the necessary vocal glow for the latter, and sounding strained in the former.

In his 1992 Kaleidophone (string quartet, harp and percussion, conducted by John Finucane), Fergus Johnston seems concerned to set up processes for generating a grand architectural vision. He achieves what he sets out to do with, as it were, a broadness of brush stroke which left this listener wishing that the detail of the moment had been attended to with more concern for the intrinsic interest of the transitory material.

Poulenc's late (1958) Flute Sonata made a pleasantly light opener, and the Primavera Quintet by the prolific individualist Charles Koechlin (18671950), whose output includes a Seven Stars Symphony (stars as in Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich), provided an intriguingly childlike close in post-Faure mode.