The RTE NSO playing the Beethoven Symphony Cycle at the NCH Dublin is reviewed.

Gerhard Markson's cycle of the Beethoven symphonies with the RTÉ NSO comes at an interesting time in his tenure with the orchestra. It's the big statement of his second three-year contract as principal conductor - this season's major Stravinsky retrospective was shared with other conductors. And, as such, it is sending out a curiously mixed message.

The Markson years have been years of focussed programming and that pattern will continue next year, with a Brahmsfest and the start of a Shostakovich symphony cycle that will include a number of symphonies never performed in Ireland before.

They have also, however, been years in which the standards of technical delivery and interpretative vision which one would like to see from a principal conductor have not been consistently achieved. The solid promise of Markson's early Strauss performances has not been fulfilled, and the Beethoven series itself encapsulates many of the issues involved.

Markson's Beethoven is one that's at its best when the music can be expected to drive itself forwardwith vigour. In the middle three concerts of the series this ensured that the Eroica was firmly projected, and that the Seventh could surge with rhythmic energy. Both these symphonies have slow movements whose special character showed

Markson in sensitively responsive mode.

It's a truism that the public prefers the odd-numbered Beethoven symphonies to the even-numbered ones, and Markson's successes have also been generally following the pattern of public taste.

The major exception has been the Pastoral Symphony, the Sixth, which the public loves, but which Markson delivered in rather too heavy a manner, as if the composer's experiences were clouded by having

overindulged himself at the table before venturing into the countryside.

Sharpness of observation and response were compromised in this performance, lassitude often replaced brightness of spirit, and much of the music-making was, quite frankly, dull.

The Pastoral was paired with the incidental music Beethoven wrote for an 1810 production of Goethe's Egmont. The two soprano songs were sung with appealingly fresh tone by Mairéad Buicke.

Although she sometimes allowed her vibrato to thicken under pressure, and needs to control the volume of her high notes a little more, she's clearly a young singer you can expect to hear a lot more of.

Part of Beethoven's Egmont music consists of a melodrama, a mixture of spoken word and music that fascinated Mozart and Richard Strauss as well as Beethoven. The text was spoken by Dieter Kaegi, mostly in English but with some

sentences of German thrown in to preserve the flavour of the original.

For my money, all-German speech with a printed text in English would have been a better solution, as the often heavily-accented English was hard to follow, with the NCH acoustic swallowing up words from a delivery that itself seemed to be none too clear in the first place.

Only the overture from the Egmont music is at all well known, and the playing of high-quality but unfamiliar Beethoven showed serious unevenness in the NSO's delivery, including patches of loose ensemble that ought to be surprising if not actually worrying under the orchestra's principal conductor.

The performances of the Fourth and Eighth Symphonies didn't reach either the musical or technical consistency of this series' best performances.

Beethoven in unpressured high spirits is a mode that Markson seems to find elusive, and in the absence of the sweep that can carry things along in more dramatic movements, the music-making often missed the mark, the polish of the playing dulled, the technical standards fluctuated.

The picture of Beethoven as a tortured genius writing works of earth-shattering import doesn't always allow room for an awareness of a composer whose musical wit was extremely sharp and who handled good humour with exceptional mastery. It's the former who is being altogether better served in this series than the latter. Michael Dervan

The review of Beethoven's Symphony No 9 will appear tomorrow