Reviews

The National Chamber Choir's "Portraits" series is exploring repertoire dear to the hearts of three guest conductors. This second concert, under British choral guru Paul Hillier, was a fusion of Renaissance polyphony and contemporary meditation.

Cross-fertilisation between styles ancient and modern has long been Hillier's speciality. In the late 1980s, with his own Hilliard Ensemble, his notable recordings not only breathed new life into the medieval composer Perotin, but also gave many listeners their first taste of Arvo Pärt.

Hillier and the NCC emphasised commonalities rather than contrasts between the stringent calculations of long-dead composers and the unsentimental musings of living ones, with results that could entirely satisfy neither the purist nor the hedonist.

Coolly consistent soprano and alto lines brought refinement to Dufay's proto-minimalist Gloria ad modum tubae, his imposing motet Nuper rosarum flores, and Tallis's ultra-restrained anthem If ye love me.

Yet these pieces, originally intended for ensembles of closely-matched male voices, would have benefited from more unified vocal timbres.

Indeed, colour and balance constantly favoured the tenors and basses, who achieved some impressive tonal integration in . . . Which Was the Son of . . . , Pärt's surprisingly varied setting of the genealogy of Christ.

Hillier's dispassionate approach was well suited to the disjunct syllables and melancholy, drifting consonance of Suvine Vihm (summer rain), a working of Latin old-testament and English texts by the Estonian Pärt-disciple Toivo Tulev. With the more focused desolation of David Lang's Again (After Ecclesiastes), however, the music's latent emotiveness seemed to be actively resisted. - Andrew Johnstone

Leonard, McGonnell, Johnston, Collins - National Gallery, Dublin

Ian Wilson - The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World. Messiaen - Quartet for the End of Time

The text for Belfast-born Ian Wilson's new piece for narrator and chamber ensemble is from Gabriel García Márquez's short story of the same name.

Wilson, who was commissioned by the IIB Bank "Music in Great Irish Houses" to provide a piece for these forces, told Arminta Wallace of this newspaper that the genre of narration and music is a "troublesome one. There are many examples of it - but very few successful ones."

His concern was well-placed, with the balance between amplification for the spoken word and the unamplified instrumental music proving unsuccessful at the work's premiere in the Shaw Room at the National Gallery.

Anyone new to the story - about how an entire village becomes almost infatuated with a beautiful corpse that washes up on the shore - would have been hard-pressed to follow it, as well as frustrated by the frequent masking of the music. That said, what a pity it would be to give up on the piece without first attempting to resolve the balance issue.

Those who know the García Márquez story must surely have felt, as I did, that Wilson's music - now watery and pictorial, now expressive of psychological states, now mysterious and abstract - uncannily captured the story's strangely winning mix of the macabre and the beautiful, ending with exactly the warm, weird kind of happiness that the author seems to have intended.

Entirely in tune with the atmosphere was the narrator Gavin Friday, who revealed in his deep, breathy delivery a twinkling appetite for the morbid as well as an appreciation for the positive human outcome of the story.

The occasion provided an extra pleasure in bringing together three of Ireland's finest musicians from the one generation: violinist Catherine Leonard, clarinetist Carol McGonnell and pianist Finghin Collins. Together with cellist Guy Johnston they gave alert, lively and spiritually-charged performances of both the Wilson and then Messiaen's heaven-gazing musical escape route from his POW camp in 1941, the Quartet for the End of Time. - Michael Dungan