Hugh Tinney, Callino String Quartet

NCH John Field Room, Dublin

Britten — Quartet No 3. Thomas Adès – Piano Quintet. Sofia Gubaidulina – Chaconne. Schnittke – Piano Quintet

The former Mostly Modern series became Music21 back in 2006, adopting a name that seemed to suggest a concentration on music from the 21st rather than the 20th century. Tuesday’s John Field Room concerto, however, was a mostly 20th century affair, offering just one work from the current decade, in company with one from the 1960s and two from the 1970s.

The most recent pieces were the two piano quintets. Thomas Adès’s, from 2001, has a strong sense of a narrative haunted by the past, sometimes turning its material over with the locked-groove insistence of a disturbingly bad dream. It’s a strongly gripping work, and Hugh Tinney and the Callino Quartet captured both its linear independence and its specific evocations with real potency.

Alfred Schnittke's Piano Quintetof 1976 is a pained, impassioned work that was prompted by the death of the composer's mother, a work which he managed to complete only after a four-year-long struggle. The Callinos made the most of the piece's often microtonally-expressed wrenching anguish, with Tinney an unflinching partner, both in stridency and peace.

Tinney steered clear of the steeliness that a lot of players favour in Sofia Gubaidulina’s early Chaconne of 1962, tempering the angularity and harshness of the writing in a way that made the piece sound more traditionally anchored than usual.

In Benjamin Britten's third and last string quartet, his Third, from 1975, the Callino's playing was at its best when it was at its most restrained, with the swaying calm of the closing Passacaglia, subtitled La Serenissima (the work was partly written in Venice), sounding particularly persuasive.

The Music21 Series continues at lunchtime today.

MICHAEL DERVAN

RTÉCO/David Brophy

NCH, Dublin

As a rule, new orchestral works commissioned by RTÉ are assigned to other concerts than the popular Summer Lunchtime series. But this week’s programme was an exception.

Composer Ciarán Farrell, who was a pupil of the Oscar-winning Ennio Morricone, had judged the occasion well, attaining a kind of chic brashness without overstepping the bounds of easy listening. His Spirit of the Seais an eight-minute voyage through whistle-along shanties, um-cha harmonies, and a welter of chintzy details that, like waves, constantly vie among themselves for the listener's attention.

The RTÉ Concert Orchestra was kept busy, and in good form, by principal conductor David Brophy. Mendelssohn's Midsummer Night's Dream Scherzo, though a tad chubby, was pleasingly brisk. While Falla's Ritual Fire Dance sacrificed some of its visceral energy to polished execution and clean sonority, there was plenty of urgency to the Overture and Hornpipe from Handel's Water Music.

The finest playing had come in Verdi's La forza del destino Overture, where keen nuancing and trim execution were allied to assured navigation of the ever-switching tempos. Four items by Mozart, Donizetti, Bellini and Puccini – all from opera and all in Italian – had been chosen by guest soprano Colette Boushell, who has recently completed a period of study at the Royal College of Music in London.

As an experienced oratorio soloist, Boushell is no stranger to the National Concert Hall. To hear the promising and personal affinity she’s forging with the bel canto style, however, was something of a revelation.

The manner may be unassuming, but the voice has an incisive authority: high notes are free and radiantly powerful, and there’s a positively instrumental quality to passages and trills. Underpinning all this musicianliness seemed to lie the conviction that opera is about much more than singing to the gallery.

ANDREW JOHNSTONE