Among the reviews today is Schubert's Unfinished Symphony from the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and the Concorde/O'Leary performance at the Hugh Lane Gallery.
Royal Philharmonic Orchestra: Schubert - Unfinished Symphony.
Bruch - Violin Concerto No 1. lgar - Enigma Variations. The Helix.
Sunday night saw the second appearance this year by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra at the Mahony Hall in The Helix.
The programme, as before, was a popular one, with a first half - Schubert's Unfinished Symphony and Bruch's G minor Violin Concerto - that should have proved indestructible, and in Elgar's EnigmaVariations a closing work that could be expected to prove similarly resilient in the hands of British players.
The evening's young conductor, Scotsman Garry Walker, worked hard at the music, presenting the Schubert as two laborious slow movements, heavy in tread, often murky in orchestration above mezzo forte, and grimly glowering in most of the climaxes.
In the circumstances, the beautiful calm of the clarinet solos in the second movement was not only striking in itself, but particularly welcome.
The weighty approach was continued in the Bruch concerto, where Walker's accompaniments for soloist Nicola Loud often sounded more challenging than supportive.
Loud is a solid fiddler, able of technique and sure in musicianship, but the rewards of her playing would surely have been greater if she had been allowed a little more prominence at many points in this performance.
The conductor's demonstrative approach yielded better dividends in Elgar's Enigma Variations. This was a performance which allowed the players to let their hair down, with the blazing thrust of the heavy brass counterbalanced by many moments of inwardness, and music-making that was strong in character throughout.
Michael Dervan
Concorde/O'Leary: Jane O'Leary - Reflections II. Fumiko Miyachi - Myojo. Rob Canning - Dolly is Dead. Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin.
So much of the music one hears, or overhears, in the shops, in the streets, on car radios or in the house, is so begrimed by familiarity or debased by unskilful amplification that the ear, in self-defence, becomes insensitive. The music played by Concorde, on the other hand, is always contemporary, sounds fresh, and demands an innocent ear or at any rate an ear free of preconceptions.
Jane O'Leary modestly introduced her Reflections II as an example of the kind of shape-changing and shifting perspectives that would be heard in the other pieces, especially Rob Canning's new Dolly is Dead, where not only did the players move around and between sections of the audience, but were also allowed - indeed expected - to control their musical material in such a way that their contributions were both individual and yet related, however tenuously, to each other.
Fumiko Miyachi's Myojo (Morning Star), for voice, violin, piano and tape, attained an ethereal quality thanks to the quiet and meditative nature of the instrumentation and of the voice part which had some of the inflections of an oriental chant.
Douglas Sealy
RTÉCO: Schumann - Overture, Scherzo and Finale. Bach - Violin Concerto in E. Wagner - Siegfried Idyll. Mendelssohn - Italian Symphony. The Helix, Dublin.
The adventure has begun. After many false starts, the RTÉ Concert Orchestra is once again approaching the challenge of building its presence and reputation in the established repertoire for mid-sized orchestras.
This time it has the benefit of taking up the challenge in the Mahony Hall at The Helix, which has clear acoustic advantages over the NCH. And it's also now in the charge of a dynamic new principal conductor, Laurent Wagner.
He replaces Proinnsías Ó Duinn whose best work with the orchestra over a period of a quarter of a century was too sporadic to cement a relationship with the public in the area of repertoire that Wagner is now clearly set on developing.
Saturday's programme is the first of a series called A Tale of Four Cities, the cities being Leipzig, Prague, Paris and Budapest.
This is a coathanger of a concept, allowing anything that loosely matches the criteria to be draped one over the other.
Only one of the evening's four pieces by Leipzig-born composers was actually premiered in that city.
Bach's Violin Concerto in E is likely to have been first heard in Köthen, Wagner's Siegfried Idyll was premiered on the stairs of the composer's home on the shores of Lake Lucerne, and Mendelssohn's Italian Symphony, written in Italy and finished in Berlin, was first heard in London.
No matter. The question on everyone's mind is less likely to have been about the music than about the conductor and his effect on the orchestra that, a year later than planned, is finally taking a major part in the musical life of Dublin's northside.
Wagner's transformation of the RTÉCO can reasonably be likened to that brought about by Bryden Thomson on the RTÉSO in the mid-1980s.
On Saturday he brought the orchestra's playing into sharply musical focus by tightening ensemble, tidying up intonation, and paying more attention to distinctions of dynamics and matters of balance between the various sections of the orchestra.
The immediate outcome was that the RTÉCO sounded like a better orchestra, though, as in any orchestral cleaning up it also caused the remaining laggards to stand out all the more clearly.
Michael Dervan
