Romeo and Juliet - Tchaikovsky Violin
Concerto No 1 - Bruch Symphony
No 8 - John Kinsella
John Kinsella's move away from dissonant avant-gardism took place in the 1970s.
His infatuation with the symphony as a primary means of expression dates from the mid-1980s and, since his retirement as head of music at RTE in 1988, he's been prolific in this field, though not yet approaching the scale of a number of other 20th-century composers, Nikolai Miaskovsky (27 symphonies), Havergal Brian (32), or Alan Hovhaness (who has completed more than 65).
Kinsella's symphonic style tends towards a certain spareness, almost puritan in its tightness of focus and eschewal of the advanced techniques of orchestration now widely exploited in symphonic music. An imaginary listener hearing Friday's premiere of his single-movement Eighth Symphony without any knowledge of the composer or his background would be forgiven for imagining it to be the work of a Bruckner-loving, Nordic post-minimalist.
The Eighth, subtitled Into the Millennium, calls for three boy soprano soloists (Stephen O'Brien, Adam West and Robbie Sexton), who intersperse the words of a Celtic blessing with repetitions of Dona nobis pacem. It's not a subtle gesture, but then in many ways directness seems a greater priority for Kinsella than subtlety. This is music without an apparent iota of Angst, even in its occasional moments of sourly dissonant transition.
That it doesn't quite sustain the joie de vivre that its composer explicitly aspires to is mostly a matter of length. On a first hearing, the symphony sounded rather longer than its matter and manner of argument seemed successfully able to sustain.
The ardency of conductor Proinnsias O Duinn's urgings in Tchaikovsky's Romeo and Juliet, which opened the concert, didn't always get an accurate response from the players of the National Symphony Orchestra. O Duinn is a man who likes a spur-of-the-moment immediacy and the NSO seemed collectively less than responsive on this occasion.
French violinist Raphael Oleg's handling of Bruch's G minor Violin Concerto was a treat for anyone who thinks rhythmic precision as important as the projection of a romantic rhetorical stance for the soloist in this work. It's the sort of approach that's most often dubbed "classical". But, classical or no, Oleg's sensitive manner agreeably freshened the outlines of Bruch's romantic war-horse, and O Duinn and the orchestra entered rewardingly into the spirit of the performance.
