Overture to a Kitchen Comedy - AJ Potter
Rhapsody under a High Sky - A.J. Potter
Three Irish Pictures - Victory
Through Streets Broad and Narrow - Philip Martin
Megalithic Ritual Dances - Brian Boydell
In Ireland - Harty
Irish Rhapsody No 1 - Stanford
What a strange idea it was for RTE to advertise the above programme, given by the National Symphony Orchestra at the NCH last Friday, as "Irish Orchestral Classics". If these pieces do indeed, in RTE's view, show what's best in Irish orchestral music or what's at the heart of the repertoire, one can be forgiven for wondering why none of them features in the regular concerts of the NSO. The most recent public performance by the orchestra that I've been able to trace was of A.J. Potter's Rhapsody under a High Sky, in a lunchtime concert as far back as 1988.
That said, it was interesting to hear these pieces in a single programme, especially under Proinnsias O Duinn, a conductor who pays due attention to the tactful balancing of projection and restraint that much of this music demands. A.J. Potter was in wink-andnod, begob-and-begorrah mode for his Overture to a Kitchen Comedy. By contrast, in his Rhapsody under a High Sky, he reflected the sort of pastoral nostalgia associated with his teacher, Vaughan Williams. O Duinn's performances caught well the different strengths of the two pieces, both written in 1950, when the composer was in his early 30s.
With their much later dates, the cautious idiom of Gerard Victory's Three Irish Pictures of 1980 and Philip Martin's rather more dissonant Through Streets Broad and Narrow of 1981 (heard with the composer himself on top form at the piano) sounded like tired, selfconscious throwbacks to an earlier age. Brian Boydell's Megalithic Ritual Dances (1956), with their evocation of the rites of pagan Ireland, were captured with starker moods and greater cut and thrust than are to be found on the NSO's recent CD recording.
The final two works in the programme date from the early years of the century. Hamilton Harty's In Ireland fantasy, composed for flute and piano in 1918 and orchestrated for flute, harp and orchestra in 1935, benefited from the liquidly brilliant flute playing of William Dowdall. And Charles Villiers Stanford's pioneering Irish Rhap- sody No. 1 (1901), the most crafty (in more than one sense) piece of the evening, was given an affectionate reading which made it easy to understand the work's immediate success.
