The concert at the National Concert Hall last Friday night included one premiere and one infrequently played early work by Brahms. The latter, the Serenade No. 2 in A, is scored for woodwind, two horns, and strings minus violins. With the RTE Concert Orchestra's normal complement of violas and cellos increased to six per section, the sound had an appropriate balance between chamber-music lightness and full-orchestral richness. In that respect at least, the Brahms went better than Kodaly's Dances of Galanta, where ample string melody felt a little undernourished.
Nevertheless, both these pieces had a rhythmic alertness and deft attack which served them well. Everybody seemed inspired by the rich detail of Brahms's textures and played responsively, and with an apt, Classical style of phrasing. Although I found that the conductor Proinnsias O Duinn took the slow movement too fast, this was a rewarding performance.
Ronan Guilfoyle's Violin Concerto lasts around 30 minutes and is an ambitious yet fundamentally flawed piece. It has its moments; but they remain just that. The rhythmically vibrant solo playing of the RTECO's leader Michael d'Arcy, for whom the concerto was written, was the most striking aspect of the piece.
All three movements use repeated figures to create size - a short figure in the first, 12-bar blues in the third, and a long-spun passacaglia in the slow movement. Woven around these repetitions are ideas based on the additive rhythms of jazz, plus others which suggest a more symphonic, periodic treatment. Yet the symphonic material never achieves the goal-driven quality it suggests, and the jazz-based ideas are layered too deeply to either co-exist with the symphonic or to create fruitful tension.
