A selection of reviews by Irish Timescritics

RTÉ Philharmonic Choir, RTÉ NSO/Hill

NCH, Dublin

Mendelssohn– St Paul

This performance of St Pauloffered an evening of great, big singing. And then again it didn't. It all depended on which of the evening's contributions you were most swayed by. The strengths were all with the RTÉ Philharmonic Choir, whose singing under guest conductor David Hill positively glowed with resonant ardency. Mendelssohn's first oratorio is not short on opportunities for affirmative choral delivery, and the choir, fortified by a small number of professional voices, held its collective head high, stoning blasphemers to the death with relish, and praising the lord with unstinting choral glory.

The four vocal soloists were another matter entirely. The bulk of the work falls on the soprano and tenor, and neither Celine Byrne nor Timothy Robinson sounded entirely comfortable.

Byrne was rather better with the notes than with the words, which were rarely sufficiently clear, and suffered from awkward-sounding rhythmic delivery: the English translation of Mendelssohn’s German original is, admittedly, anything but a straightforward undertaking. Robinson carried the words more easily, but sounded less consistently comfortable with the notes.

The Paul of bass Owen Gilhooly was more effortful than commanding, often sounding over-stretched by the matter of making enough sound. It was the young mezzo soprano Raphaela Mangan who negotiated her part with the greatest sense of naturalness.

Hill's conducting was well energised, but he didn't find a way around the work's tendency towards samey-ness. It's a truism that you can have too much of a good thing. And the choral contributions in this performance often fell into a smoothly-functioning groove that offered just that. Taken in isolation, almost any of the choral numbers would have made a huge impression. But, and this is surely why St Paullags well behind Mendelssohn's later Elijah, collectively they amounted to less than the sum of their very considerable parts. MICHAEL DERVAN

Roche, Bodwell, Ritchie, Cooper, Doris, O’Donnell

Marlay Park House, Dublin

Ian Wilson– Double Trio

Ian Wilson's Double Triois an ambitious work commissioned as part of an ambitious undertaking. Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council's Place Identity programme is funded under the Per Cent for Art scheme, which allows amounts of up to €64,000 from public capital construction projects to be spent on an artwork.

Wilson’s work was concentrated on the Glencullen electoral area, where he recorded interviews in which people “discussed how they felt about the changes the area had undergone – or not – during the time of the Celtic Tiger economic boom”. The new Double Trio, with a thousand copies being distributed free on CD as part of the project, brings together three classical performers and three jazz musicians.

The musical material is generated from the rhythmic and melodic patterns of clips from the interviews, with Wilson using the kind of technique that is best-known from Steve Reich's Different Trainsof 1988. That work was based on the composer's recollection of the regular journeys he made by train as a child between New York and Los Angeles, and his reflection that, as a Jew, had he been living in Europe at that time (during the second World War) he would have had to ride very different trains. Wilson's piece, which runs for around an hour and is cast in eight movements, is altogether less personal in its effect. Each movement is titled after the relevant interviewee(s) – Kids, The Stonemason, Catherine, and so on – and the spoken words make only fleeting, and often indecipherable appearances during the piece itself. Wilson's interest appears much more firmly focused on the musical patterns than on the meaning of what's being said.

The six instruments of the Double Trio make for an unusual mixture. Even without a note being played, the jazz trio (Cathal Roche, saxophone, Daniel Bodwell, double bass, Stu Ritchie, drums) looked a much more coherent proposition than the strange combination of the classical one (Mia Cooper, violin, Clíona Doris, harp, Richard O’Donnell, vibraphone).

The vibraphone and often the harp tended to gravitate towards the world of jazz, and the violin often sounded like the odd one out. It was hardly surprising, then, that some of the piece’s most effective moments were those when jazz improvisation seemed to have freest rein with the material that Wilson furnished.

Moments that stood out included the giddiness Wilson built in the third movement, Catherine(from the statement, "My grandfather built this house, so . . . " and the obsessive rhythmic background of the sixth, The Convenience Store Owner. But the abiding feeling at the work's concert premiere here was that there might be a much better small piece waiting to be liberated from the shackles of this big one. MICHAEL DERVAN

Devin, Butorina-Kiva

John Field Room, NCH

This recital showed why Dublin-born soprano Anna Devin has attracted increasing international attention in recent years. She sings as if song is heightened poetry. She is one of those too-rare singers for whom vibrato is not habitual, but an expressive device – and that includes not using it. With impeccable artistic purpose, she can deploy a wide range of colour and volume across the full width of her range. She has presence, but she’s no show-off; and her comportment is engaging and endearing.

This lunchtime programme included music by Mozart, Strauss, Debussy, Verdi, Novello and Lehar. Such variety invites comparisons, and one is that Devin's projection of words was usually clear in German, Italian and English, but not so convincing in French. Another is that she can capture the inner meaning of songs as different from one another as Strauss's Morgenand "Caro nome" from Verdi's Rigoletto.

That serious artistic intelligence would have been even more obvious if we had been given translations. Spoken introductions, even when delivered with insight, as on this occasion, are no substitute. Her partnership with pianist Lina Butorina-Kiva was always convincing and full of mutual rapport. Piano pieces by Rachmaninov and Debussy confirmed the naturalness of this Ukrainian player’s musicianship.

All singing is driven by vowels; but when sound is as dominated by vowel tones as Anna Devin's is, extra care is needed to differentiate them, and make them and consonants specific to the language concerned. That was a limitation in the French, and occasionally elsewhere. But her encore, "O mio babbino caro" from Puccini's Gianni Schicchi, bore out John Dryden's envious comment that Italian sounds as if it was invented for the purposes of music and poetry. It typified Devi's mature knack of making things sound just right. MARTIN ADAMS