Barainsky, Cápová, RTÉ NSO/Grams

Schubert — Unfinished Symphony Berg — Sieben frühe Lieder Mozart — Piano Concerto in C K246 Schoenberg — Verklaerte Nacht at the NCH, Dublin

There was an unusual construction to the penultimate programme of the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra's current subscription season at the National Concert Hall on Friday.

The four works were all Viennese, but placed so that the audience was carried forwards and backwards through the centuries, from Schubert to Berg to Mozart to Schoenberg.

It might have proved a rewarding excursion had the performances been better. American conductor Andrew Grams, making his début with the orchestra, seemed determined to keep a firm grip on proceedings, which he did, but he also seemed concerned to leave firm fingerprints of his own on each of the works. This made for an unsympathetically hard-edged account of Schubert's Unfinished Symphony, replete with recurring moments of attention-seeking emphasis that popped secondary material up a few levels into the foreground.

Grams was far more at one with the gorgeous scoring of Berg's Seven Early Songs, but, sadly, not at one with the evening's soloist Claudia Barainsky. The conductor, of course, was in the right. Barainsky sang these romantic songs with the kind of rebarbative angularity that might have suited the world of the 1950s avant garde.

In this performance of the Berg, the result was simply that voice and orchestra seemed to be involved in different pieces of music.

The soloist in Mozart's early Piano Concerto in C, K246, was the Cork pianist Rebecca Cápová. She took a little while to settle in, after which her playing was cleanly and studiously fluent.

The concert ended with Schoenberg's Verklärte Nacht (Transfigured Night) for string orchestra, a work inspired by a poem by Richard Dehmel in which, in a wood at night, a woman tells her lover that she is pregnant by another man.

His response is to tell her that his feeling for her "will transfigure the stranger's child, and you'll bear me that child, as if begot by me". Grams's performance of this hothouse work was clean, but lacking in atmosphere.