Review

THe Irish Times reviews a concert which took place at the National Concert Hall in Dublin

Moynihan, RTÉCO/Earley

NCH, Dublin

August marks a changing of the guard for the two RTÉ orchestras, and the Concert Orchestra took over from the National Symphony Orchestra with a lunchtime programme that embraced some ultra-familiar classics.

To be sure, Pachelbel's Canon, Handel's I Know That My Redeemer Livethand Bach's so-called Air on the G Stringmake for an eminently marketable bill of fare. Trouble is, the better known the music, the greater the risk of prejudicial comparison with other performances of it.

Soprano Deirdre Moynihan put her distinctive fioratura to refreshing work in the Handel piece, capturing moments of appropriately gentle fervour.

The aria Bist du bei mirfrom Stölzel's opera Diomedeswas sung to Bach's arrangement with cello and chamber organ duo, and retained a certain chilliness of feeling after an unsettled introduction.

It was thus the less lyrical, more decorative textures of Tornami a vagheggiar from Handel's Alcinaand a second Messiahnumber, the 12/8 version of Rejoice Greatly, that revealed Moynihan at her agile, colourful best.

Guest conductor Desmond Earley, who is artistic director of the UCD Choral Scholars, is sometimes an auxiliary keyboard player with the RTÉCO, and he supervised the orchestra partly from the harpsichord.

Further nods to period performance practice included some persuasively vibrato-free melody in Bach’s Air, and the always preferable old-style disposition of the violin sections, with seconds on the right of the platform.

The general interpretive style, however (to the extent that there was one), was mainstream, and the musicians were not above a few gimmicks in Handel's Royal FireworksOverture. Sadly, that didn't work to the advantage of three movements from Respighi's lusciously neo-classical suite, The Birds, where frayed execution and some grotesque over-projection of the detail did scant justice to an exquisite score.

ANDREW JOHNSTONE