Reviews

Reviewed today are: Oppitz, RTÉ NSO/Markson, Ulster Orchestra/Barlow and Kenny, RTÉ Vanbrugh Quartet

Oppitz, RTÉ NSO/Markson

NCH, Dublin

Beethoven - Coriolan overture, Piano Concerto

No 3. Prokofiev - Symphony No 7

The Prokofiev who worked on what was to prove his final symphony, in 1951 and 1952, was a man living under a double shadow. He was in ill health and under doctor's orders to curtail his work, and the effects of the official condemnation of leading composers' work in 1948 were still being felt.

The Seventh Symphony, a commission from the children's division of Russian State Radio for "a simple symphony, for young listeners", won the approbation of a posthumous Lenin Prize in 1957 and was lavished with praise in Israel Nestyev's Soviet biography, published the same year. But the work has never been quite so favourably received in the West, where its placid nature has even been seen as a retrogression.

The symphony, heard at the end of the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra's chronological Prokofiev symphony cycle last Friday, is almost unceasingly tuneful, with echoes both of Prokofiev's ballet Romeo And Juliet and his First Symphony, the Classical.

Gerhard Markson, the conductor, seems to have grasped that what's on the surface of this music is not at all the same as what's underneath and that, as in Mozart, probing at the surface is not necessarily the best way to enrich the music's expressive depth.

His performance gave an impressive yield in terms of colour and sweetness, and he made the most of the often delectable orchestration. At the same time the melancholy and nostalgic undertow was not neglected, so the music's always slightly strange balance of emotion was faithfully represented.

The concert opened with a surprisingly understated performance of Beethoven's Coriolan overture, where the drama of the music's shifts in dynamic and mood was rarely realised.

The German pianist Gerhard Oppitz offered a blunt, no-frills approach to Beethoven's C minor Piano Concerto. The playing may at times have seemed a little too unyielding, particularly in the flourishes of the first-movement cadenza. But the upside was an intensity of focus that yielded both grip and momentum. The audience made it plain that it would happily have heard Oppitz play an encore. On this occasion, however, he didn't oblige.- Michael Dervan

Ulster Orchestra/Barlow

Millennium Forum, Derry

Weber - Der Freischütz overture. Mozart - Clarinet Concerto. Seán Ó Riada - Nomos No 1, Hercules Dux Ferrariae. Mendelssohn - Symphony No 4, Italian

The Ulster Orchestra seemed very close to us on the stage of the Millennium Forum, and it sounded very close.

The revealing acoustic did no harm to the first movement of the Mendelssohn, in which Stephen Barlow, instead of relying on mere speed, allowed Mendelssohn's beautiful orchestral writing to sparkle through deftly articulated detail and carefully controlled ensemble.

The intimate feel of the venue also helped the Mozart. As with several recent performers, Emma Johnson used Mozart's original basset clarinet, with the extra extension taking the instrument down to low A.

The earthy bass notes gave a pungent character to the lower register, but it is Johnson's unearthly playing of the slow movement, sensitively accompanied by the Ulster Orchestra strings, which will stay in the memory.

The dry acoustic did no favours to the Weber overture, however, which was nicely played but understandably lacked atmosphere, and the strings in the Ó Riada would have likewise benefited from a more generous ambience. Written in the mid 1950s and based, like the Josquin Mass from which it takes its name, on a series of notes taken from the words "Hercules dux ferrariae", Ó Riada blends plainchant-like passages, mid-20th-century tonality and then-fashionable serialism with surprising effectiveness.

His creative personality holds the disparate elements together, as when dense but expressive chords in the fifth section, representing the modernist pole of the work, are followed by a bitter-sweet pastiche waltz. This performance reminds us once again that Ó Riada's serious concert works deserve more recognition. - Dermot Gault

Kenny, RTÉ Vanbrugh Quartet

John Field Room, Dublin

John Kenny - Voice of the Carnyx. Dvorak - Quartet In G Op 106. Edward McGuire - Zephyr. Nigel Osborne - Forest­River­Ocean

The trombonist John Kenny is obviously a man on a crusade when it comes to the carnyx. The carnyx, or ancient war horn, in question was discovered in 1816, only the head of the instrument, which had been shaped to resemble a boar's head, having survived the two millennia or so since its burial.

It took nearly a further 200 years, until 1991 in fact, before the project of attempting to reconstruct the instrument as a whole got under way. Kenny was the player who launched the carnyx on its modern career in 1993. And, with only a single modern reconstruction currently available for anyone to play on, he remains its sole performer cum propagandist.

The instrument, which is played like a long vertical trumpet with a red-tongued, red-eyed animal head, can make a fearsome sound.

As Kenny pointed out, speaking at his concert with the RTÉ Vanbrugh Quartet on Sunday, it's even louder than the trombone, so it's an instrument on which it's easy to breach health and safety regulations about volume levels.

Kenny's Voice Of The Carnyx, for solo carnyx with multitracked carnyces on tape, is a sort of calling card for the instrument, a latter-day fantasy that immerses the listener in the range of performing effects that Kenny has dreamed up for this ancient artefact.

The carnyx's best note has a power and clarity that any brass player would envy. But apart from that the effects are those of evocation, exploiting the instrument's unique harmonic series, and a range of other sounds - often throaty and sometimes effortful - reminiscent of Dennis Brain's

hosepipe playing as recorded at the comical Hoffnung concerts of the

1950s.

Nigel Osborne's Forest­River­Ocean brings together carnyx and string quartet with an electronic overlay of sound recordings made at the location where the Deskford carnyx was discovered in 1816.

The title sets the scene for this three-movement work, in which the string-quartet episodes carry a musical weight that the carnyx, however evocative through its associations, simply cannot rival.

The concert also included another evocative work, Edward McGuire's Zephyr for trombone and string quartet, which created sound images of wind, and the sole standard repertoire piece, Dvorak's penultimate string quartet, which came across as more strained than relaxed in the unusual musical surroundings. - Michael Dervan