A celebration of Thomas Moore and the conclusion of the Organics festival at the National Concert Hall in today's reviews.

The Harp That Once Through Tara's Halls

St Ann's Church, Dawson St, Dublin

Saturday's programme, entitled The Harp That Once Through Tara's Halls, was bound to be a Thomas Moore celebration with difference. After all, it was promoted by the Historical Harp Society of Ireland, and it involved a sean-nós singer.

It's two centuries since the first volume of Thomas Moore's Irish Melodies appeared and began the conquest of 19th-century Romantic imagination.

Moore, obviously, didn't write the actual melodies, though he did adapt them to his own new texts. Nor did he write the piano accompaniments, the bulk of which were provided by composer John Stevenson. But the combination of words and melody clearly had a special appeal.

Moore became a major conduit for the dissemination of Irish music. And over the years it's been Stevenson whose work has come in for criticism, as also have a number of later composers who attempted to improve on Stevenson's efforts.

Saturday's concert was divided into two halves. Before the interval there were un-Moore-ified pieces for Irish harp (shared between Ann Heymann and Siobhán Armstrong, two of the instrument's leading exponents), and songs sung by Connemara sean-nós singer Róisín Elsafty, most of them lightly accompanied by Armstrong.

The second half was devoted to Moore's work, 11 songs sung by tenor John Elwes with accompaniments by Malcolm Proud on a Clementi square piano, a domestically scaled instrument of 1825.

The wire-strung Irish harp is, in the right hands, an instrument of uncommon appeal. Even St Ann's, a church whose acoustic easily turns muddy, the instrument's light yet sharp attack and delicate halo of resonance effortlessly filled the venue with gentle sound. Moore's own melodies are a tricky proposition for a 21st-century performer. They don't quite work as art-songs, nor can they function as we like folk-songs to sound.

Elwes and Proud managed to make their chosen settings - all given informative spoken introductions by Barra Boydell - sound agreeably direct. Elwes didn't shy away from moments shaped by the imposition of the interpretative artifice of the classical song recital. He could with profit borrow elements of the manner of Elsafty's singing, which seemed to combine paradoxical characteristics of firmness and relaxation and yet could take the most elaborate of embellishments in its stride.

MICHAEL DERVAN

Caulfield/ NCC/ Brophy

NCH, Dublin

Organics, the National Concert Hall's mini festival of choral and organ music, concluded with a recital by the National Chamber Choir that was an avowed exercise in counter-intuitive programming.

Guest conductor David Brophy explained that, rather than consisting of the "light" repertoire usually served up at lunchtime concerts, this one would point the way to a different kind of lightness, that of the lux aeterna.

That said, the prevailing theme of mortality made for rather heavy listening. Rhythmic vigour was mostly expended on the opening item, Barber's arresting setting of Gerald Manley Hopkins's God's Grandeur.

The centrepiece was the 30-minute Cadman Requiem(1989/1998) by British composer Gavin Bryars. Written in memory of a colleague who died in the Lockerbie disaster, and intended for the lean vocal canvas of the Hilliard Ensemble, it occupies a wintry middle ground between requiems of the palliative and fire-and-brimstone type.

Three movements are liturgical: an Introit-Kyrie, a Sanctusand an In Paradisum. Bryars interspersed these with two solo settings of the 7th-century Hymn of Caedmon.

Bede's Latin paraphrase of the hymn was sung with intensity to spare by tenor Eugene Ginty, in contrast to a dutiful delivery of the Old English original by bass Jeffrey Ledwidge.

Organist Fergal Caulfield backed the sparse choral textures in a deft and wiry adaptation of the composer's frugally idiomatic accompaniment for viol consort.

Brophy correlated score and performers with his customary blend of forethought and sweep, yet the absence of two of the nine listed women choristers had noticeable effects on balance - as did the dispensable organ part in Tomkins's proto-Purcellian Funeral Sentences. John Tavener's Song for Athene, however, hit the mark of controlled choral ecstasy.

ANDREW JOHNSTONE