NCH, Dublin

Lambert– Anna Karenina

Rachmaninov– Piano Concerto No 2

Vaughan Williams– Symphony No 7 (Sinfonia antartica)

CONCERTS OF film music are a regular feature in the work of the RTÉ Concert Orchestra. But what was the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra doing on Friday, offering an evening under the title Soundtracks, and advising concert-goers to “expect nostalgia and beautiful melodies”? Well, the NSO had borrowed the RTÉCO’s principal guest conductor, John Wilson, for the night. Wilson is an aficionado of the golden age of Hollywood film scores.

He’s also a conductor who, musically, likes to keep everything in the frame. He simply glories in the range of sonority a symphony orchestra can present him with. And in the case of the NSO, he insisted on it presenting him with a spectrum-wide fullness of tone that it rarely delivers.

Constant Lambert's music for Anna Kareninaand the Sinfonia antarticaVaughan Williams wrote based on his score for the film Scott of the Antarcticboth gave plenty of scope for spectacular sounds. There was not much character beyond the gorgeous orchestration in the Lambert. But the symphony is full of striking ideas, shivers and blazes, and otherworldly effects created by a wordless soprano and female chorus, atmospherically provided by Regina Nathan and New Dublin Voices.

There’s been much commentary over the years about the work being more episodic than symphonic in nature. And Wilson’s performance, which appears to have been the work’s belated Irish première did sometimes convey the feeling of being on a serious mission, without actually going anywhere in particular. But it did so in such style the audience would clearly have relished even more.

The audience also took to the young Korean pianist Jong-Hai Park, who was returning to Dublin having won the concerto prize at the 2009 Dublin International Piano Competition. His approach to Rachmaninov's Second Concerto (film connection, Brief Encounter) was aggressively virtuosic and the famous slow movement sounded unduly stiff. This was very much the performance of a young man on a mission to display his talent rather than probe the music.