A performance by the Knights Chamber Orchestra at the National Gallery, Dublin.

McGonnell, Knights Chamber Orchestra

National Gallery, Dublin

Lutoslawski- Overture for Strings. Torelli- Christmas Concerto. Copland- Clarinet Concerto.

Haydn- Concertino in C Hob XIV 12. Bartók- Divertimento for Strings.

The Knights Chamber Orchestra is a young and enthusiastic group from New York.

On Friday, when they presented an enterprising programme at the second of the National Gallery's Music for Museums concerts, they performed everything without a conductor, including two demanding 20th-century works, the Clarinet Concerto by Copland and the Divertimento for Strings by Bartók.

The orchestra's style is at once democratic and individualistic.

There were different leaders for different works and there was a lot of rotation within sections, and between them, too, in the case of the violins - no second fiddles, here.

The net effect on Friday was almost to bring a competitive edge to the playing, as if individual musicians were vying to have attention on them rather than on their colleagues.

The performances were gutsy and often unrestrained. It's been a long time since I've heard a baroque concerto grosso played with such old-style romanticism, or any concertante work where the band drowned the soloist quite as effectively as the Knights did pianist Steven Beck in Haydn's Concertino in C, Hob XIV: 12.

Placing the small piano behindthe strings created an imbalance that an alert conductor would have rectified in a jiffy.

In a sense the evening's strengths and weaknesses stemmed from the same cause. The individualistic enthusiasm made for a presentation that was always lively. But the fact that the various musical lines were pressing so consistently to dominate the foreground meant that the textures, while rich, were also unnecessarily cluttered.

The Bartók Divertimento, which I had heard from the Irish Chamber Orchestra a night earlier in Limerick sounding both exquisite and complex, here became more of an earthy carousal.

And the opening Overture by Lutoslawski came across sounding a lot more modernistic than I suspect its composer intended.

Carol McGonnell, the soloist in the 1948 Clarinet Concerto Aaron Copland wrote for Benny Goodman, served as a welcome anchor and reference point.

Her playing managed to be somehow both free and solid in a performance that gloried in an extra degree of sentimentality in the slow opening movement, took all the invitations to jazzy friskiness in the second, and showcased the virtuosity of the cadenza which joins them. - Michael Dervan