Tinney, Hastings

NCH, Dublin

David Fennessy

– Bodies.

Shostakovich– Piano Concerto No 1.

Tchaikovsky– Symphony No 4.

David Fennessy wrote his orchestral work Bodieswhen he was working in Hong Kong. He's described the feeling, in his 15th-floor hotel room, of "being hemmed in on all sides, as well as above and below, by bodies – thousands of bodies". He was struck by the contrasting awarenesses of solitude and the mass of other people, an "unseen congregation," as he has called them.

His new RTÉ orchestral commission, Bodies, premiered by the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra under Dmitri Jurowski, adopts an unusual layout – eight double basses, working as individuals rather than as a section, are arranged in a line at the back of the stage, and there is brass and percussion offstage as well as on.

The music growls and grumbles and seethes, more quietly than aggressively, creating a kind of threatening nebulosity, from which occasional blares and snarls breathe black vapours.

The music quietens unsettlingly for a musical balm to emerge, from the most unlikely of sources, a quotation of the Agnus Dei from Bach’s B minor Mass, still clouded by other sounds, and with hammering in the background, but somehow seeming to hold its own.

Jurowski paced and shaped this intriguing work effectively, and provided full-blooded accompaniment to Hugh Tinney’s romantically tinged account of the knockabout contrasts of Shostakovich’s First Piano Concerto, with Graham Hastings adding the incisive commentary on obbligato trumpet.

Jurowski made a strong impression through his Wexford Festival appearances of 2007 and 2008, but this was his first appearance in concert in Ireland, and his first time to work with the NSO. He showed his mettle impressively in an account of Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony.

The approach in the first movement was full-on in emotional charge (at the time of composition, Tchaikovsky was concerned with the idea of “Fate, the decisive force which prevents our hopes of happiness from being realised”). Yet Jurowski was also painstaking in revealing the full detail of what Tchaikovsky wrote – I don’t think I’ve ever heard the NSO lay out the thrust and counter thrust of this movement with such thoroughness before.

The playing was of the kind that sounded at times as if the wind players must have grown extra lungs and the strings found longer bows (and tougher fingers for the pizzicato in the Scherzo) to create such fullness of sound.

The songful second movement sounded a little slow, but the level of refinement was high, and the razzmatazz of the finale was excitingly done. Let’s hope that Jurowski will be back again.