{TABLE} Symphony No 38 (Prague) ......... Mozart Requiem ......................... Mozart {/TABLE} THE two Cathedrals Festival in Derry is now five years old. The very name of the festival encapsulates the cross community spirit of the enterprise and its joint artistic directors are Timothy Allen and Donal Doherty, organists of St Columb's and St Eugene's Cathedrals.
The festival has, already established a tradition of opening with choral concerts, and the repertoire traversed so far includes major works by Verdi, Elgar, Tippett, Bruckner and Beethoven. This year the large festival chorus was assembled for a performance of Mozart's Requiem with the Ulster Orchestra under Harry Christophers, whose Dublin performances of Handel's Messiah and Bach's St John Passion with the new alas defunct RTE Chorus linger fondly in the memory and whetted the appetite for more of the same.
Saturday's concert, given in the dryish acoustic of Derry's Guildhall, opened with a performance of Mozart's Prague Symphony, energetic in thrust and brisk in tempo, but rough in detail and far from tightly co ordinated (understandable, perhaps, if you take into account that the musicians of the Ulster Orchestra had played a completely different full length concert in Belfast the previous night).
In the second half, the festival chorus proved to be a group with a strong youthful presence and a correspondingly appealing freshness of tone; the women, as one has come to expect in Irish choirs, heavily outnumbered the men, and this was fully reflected in what one heard.
The driven quality of the fast speeds set by the conductor posed problems from time to time, and the eagerness of the singing was not always counterparted with sureness of intonation (the progressively flattening upward climb near the start of the Lacrimosa was perhaps the most notable instance of this).
The team of soloists included the firmly musical - mezzo soprano and bass in Alison Browner and Gwynne Howell. The tenor, James Oxley, was rather too unbending of line, and the soprano, Lynda Russell, veered too much towards the fruitily operatic for the good of the music.
