St Anne’s Church, Dawson Street, Dublin This National Chamber Choir concert was called One Day Fine, after the piece by Kevin Volans, and subtitled “A collection of work exploring Ireland’s influence in choral music”.
The key word was “influence”, with an emphasis on Irish inspiration – such as landscape and culture – rather than on Irish-born composers, who were outnumbered four-two (Dubliner Andrew Hamilton, whose Everything is Ridiculous was given in Belfast, was omitted in Dublin). In fact, the programme’s dominant ingredient was the English pastoral.
Ironically, of course, the grandfather of English pastoral was Charles Villiers Stanford, the Dublin-born teacher of Holst, Howells, Vaughan Williams et al. And it was in Stanford’s tranquil, bitter-sweet The Blue Bird that the NCC’s English conductor, Paul Hillier, had his singers at their best, with three sopranos instead of a soloist soaring effortlessly above the rest.
Other pieces in the same tradition suffered rather surprisingly from lapses of solidarity in different lines, and thus from cloudy harmony. This happened in some of the quicker songs in EJ Moeran’s Songs of Springtime, though the slower fourth song, Love is a Sickness, was fully secure and enjoyed the same sustained sense of longing as the Stanford.
Percy Grainger’s Irish Tune from County Derry was also secure and featured, unusually for Danny Boy, no sense of sentiment whatsoever.
There were two contemporary pieces, including the eponymous One Day Fine, by the South African-born Irish composer, Kevin Volans. It uses the palatal clicks of the Xhosa language to create lively ostinatos and a dancing, carefree mood not quite captured here because, again, of lapses in solidarity.
By contrast, entirely successful was Ian Wilson’s highly concentrated and delicately clustery settings of Irish translations from the Song of Solomon. It featured a lyrical solo from soprano Deirdre Moynihan and, with the Stanford, was the concert highlight.
