Reviews

Michael Dervan reviews the Killaloe Music Festival and the RTE National Symphony Orchestra.

Killaloe Music Festival

Killaloe, Co Clare

By Michael Dervan

Nicholas McGegan, who took up his role as music director of the Irish Chamber Orchestra (ICO) last September, then also became the artistic director of the orchestra's summer festival in Killaloe.

Here, the ICO was offering Haydn's Symphony No. 7, Le Midi, as the climax in a programme that also featured Rameau, Mozart and John Kinsella - McGegan chose, over three concerts, to offer all three of Haydn's attractive early symphonies named after times of the day.

The odd-man-out here is Rameau, as the ICO has shared in the general Irish neglect of the French baroque.

McGegan's sensitive handling of a suite from the opera Dardanus was both pointed and touching, and the players' pleasure in bringing this neglected repertoire so rewardingly to life was very palpable.

Patricia Moynihan played Mozart's Flute Concerto in G with a simplicity of surface that masked the considerable adaptations modern-day performers need to make to accommodate the expressive needs of Mozart's flute writing.

Most players try to wring from this concerto rather more than it has to yield, and although her tempos seemed on the cautious side - McGegan sounded as if he would have liked a more energised approach - Moynihan gave the all-too-rare impression of effortlessly letting this music speak for itself.

The opening and closing sections of John Kinsella's Hommage à Clarence, written in memory of the English violinist Clarence Myerscough, sounds as if they are drained of emotion.

The central section, in the Sibelian mode that's often to be found in Kinsella's recent music, is altogether more animated, and offers generous solo opportunities to the section leaders.

Solo writing is a feature, too, of Haydn's Le Midi, a work that embraces a strange and intriguing mix of baroque and classical practices.

The ICO's performance was both solid and exotic.

Two young Irish pianists featured in the day's concerts.

David McNulty at lunchtime was assured and tonally sophisticated in Debussy's Suite Bergamasque, but interpretatively eccentric in Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition.

Cathal Breslin, in a late-night, candle-lit concert, was thrusting but a little rough-hewn in Beethoven's Bagatelles, Op. 126.

The late-night programme also featured the newly-formed Clare String Quartet, which draws its members (Katherine Hunka, Diane Daly, Joachim Roewer and Juliet Welchman) from the ICO.

Their performance of Mozart's Quartet in D, K575, was mostly mild-mannered, but Welchman was impressive in the demonstrative cello writing which is one of this work's most distinctive features.

**********

RTÉ NSO/Pearce

NCH, Dublin

By Michael Dervan

Piano Concerto No 1 - Chopin, Sinfonia Sacra - Panufnik, Enigma Variations - Elgar.

There was a time when the music of the Polish composer Andrzej Panufnik featured altogether more prominently in Irish concert programmes than that of his colleagues Witold Lutoslawski or Krzysztof Penderecki.

Panufnik (1913-91), who fled to the west in 1954 and became a British citizen in 1961, was, ironically, excluded from Polish musical life during the early years of the Warsaw Autumn Festival, when his native city became the hot-bed of avant-garde musical activity behind the Iron Curtain.

It would not be until 1977 that his work was heard again in Poland.

For Panufnik, music was "an expression of deep feeling and true emotion" and he saw his best-known work, the Sinfonia Sacra of 1963, as being imbued with "the atmosphere of the battlefield and of prayer, these two persistently repeated elements having dominated Polish life throughout all the thousand years of its tragic history".

The work was written to mark Poland's millennium of Christianity and statehood, and is based on the Bogurodzica, the first known Polish hymn, which the composer came to know as a young man.

The work is cast in two movements, the first consisting of three visions, the second a hymn, and the dramatic writing for brass and percussion (the young Panufnik trained as a percussionist) is often contrasted with a clashing major-minor melancholy for strings.

Panufnik used his 20th-century armoury of orchestral effects with great skill to convey a simple, indeed sometimes primitive-sounding romanticism.

Colman Pearce, a long-term advocate of Panufnik's music, conducted the RTÉ NSO with urgency and warmth.

The soloist in the evening's other Polish work, Chopin's E minor Piano Concerto (the later and finer of the two, numbered one because it was the first to be published), was the Cypriot pianist Martino Tirimo. His was a studied and careful account.

But it lacked that ease of flexion in rubato, and also that natural variety of touch and texture, which are needed to bring this music fully to life.

He was not aided by the lacklustre accompaniment.

And though there was a lot more life in the performance of Elgar's Enigma Variations, there was too much arbitrary variability of detailed - lines coming in and out of focus like sounds interfered with by the wind - to make for a satisfactory presentation of what is without a doubt the greatest British orchestral work of the 19th century.