Andrew Johnstonereviews Agnew, Sweeney  at the National Concert Hall in Dublin

Agnew, Sweeney  NCH, Dublin 

The National Concert Hall's Summer Sounds at Lunchtime continued with shapely melodising from oboist David Agnew and solid accompanying from composer-organist Eric Sweeney.

The organ's trumpet stops were in pristine tune for Jeremiah Clarke's Prince of Denmark's March, whose pseudo-Purcellian pomp rears its head more often at weddings than in concerts.

In Marcello's Oboe Concerto in D minor, Sweeney's realisation of the orchestral textures was ideally balanced, although it tended towards the flutey and separated rather than the string-like and articulated.

With Sweeney's own organ solo Le Cercle de Lumière, inspired by the 2001 solar eclipse, a strong attachment to the tonic chord kept tension in abeyance until the brilliant conclusion.

The invigoration was more sustained, however, in the percussive clashes of Postlude, part of a Mass Sweeney recently composed for St Patrick's Cathedral Dublin.

Agnew's phrasing was characteristically sinuous in Satie's Gymnopedie No 1 and Saint-Saëns's The Swan. While his intonation had its unsettled moments, it improved with the transfer to cor anglais for the Largo from Dvorák's New World Symphony and an extract from the Cafe Paradiso score by ace film composer Ennio Morricone.

Gabriel's Oboe, Morricone's two-minute, sugared melody for The Mission, was, predictably enough, encored - although Agnew's remark that "everyone always wants to hear it again" mightn't have been entirely true.

But there had been a point to his jest that the stage was set up, albeit in semi-darkness, for the evening's orchestral concert - a circumstance that lends a second-best feel to lunchtime organ events at the NCH.

 Andrew Johnstone