NCH, Dublin

Barber

– Three Songs Op 2; Four Songs Op 13; Three Songs Op 10; Dover Beach; String Quartet No 1; Hermit Songs; Three Songs Op 45

Quite a range of composers have come to resent their most successful creations. For Beethoven it was his early Septet, for Bruch his Violin Concerto in G minor, for Sibelius his Valse Triste. And for Samuel Barber, it was his Adagio for Strings (from the second movement of his String Quartet No 1).

The occasion that took the Adagio well beyond the field of concert hall success was the death of US president Franklin D Roosevelt, when US radio networks used the piece to set a tone of national mourning. It was used again after the assassination of President John F Kennedy and, laden with associations, it has since been used in a number of films, including The Elephant Manand Platoon. The Adagioaccurately tells us that Barber was a romantic at a time when romanticism was unfashionable. The piece was first made famous when Toscanini, a conductor not much interested in modern music, took it up in 1938.

And its continued popularity – it was voted the saddest music in the world by listeners to BBC Radio 4's Todayprogramme in 2004 – does rather tend to skew perceptions of Barber's work. Barber is the composer of a hugely popular piece but he's not actually a popular composer, at least not in the Europe of the 21st century.

Music promoter Nóta's centenary celebration at the National Concert Hall was timed to fall on the composer's actual birthday. The concentration was on Barber's Irish associations. His mother was of Irish descent, he developed an early interest in setting Irish poetry, and he wrote his Hermit Songs, settings of Irish monastic marginia (writings), after a visit to Ireland in 1952.

The composer was himself an accomplished singer, and his smooth light baritone can be heard in a recording he made of his Matthew Arnold setting Dover Beachin 1935.

The performances of Dover Beachby Irish-American baritone Brian Mulligan with the RTÉ Vanbrugh String Quartet, and the Hermit Songs with soprano Roberta Alexander and pianist Lilia Boyadjieva were the highlights of the programme.

Mulligan, who tended to use his large voice with operatic recklessness, toned down most effectively for Dover Beach's "eternal note of sadness" and matched nicely the soft melancholy of the strings. Alexander is an experienced performer and, although her voice showed signs of inconsistency, she contoured melodic lines with skill and communicated vividly. With Boyadjieva she faithfully traced the range of the Hermit Songs, which can be serious or light-hearted, bluesy or suggestive.

The Vanburghs also offered the composer's sole String Quartet. It's an oddly balanced work, with a substantial first movement that's followed by the ubiquitous Adagio, which is always intriguingly light when heard, as it was originally conceived, from just four players. But the work is let down by what always feels like a throwaway finale. Over the years, the weight of associations of the Adagiohas probably only made the inadequacy of the finale seem even greater.