An Acclamation - Colin Mawby
Agnus Dei - Penderecki
Petite Suite (exc) - Debussy
Songs from Lyonnesse - Victory
Mother Goose Suite (exc) - Ravel
The Blue Bird - Stanford
Agnus Dei - Barber
The Promise of Living - Copland
Stomp Your Foot - Copland
Romantic aesthetics have had a long innings. The National Chamber Choir's concert at the National Gallery last Thursday evening was one of several in the choir's Millennium series devoted largely or entirely to 20th-century music.
It included such forthright specimens of Romanticism as Barber's Agnus Dei and Stanford's The Blue Bird. The latter was beautifully sung, with impeccable solos from Meav Ni Mhaolchatha.
On the surface, Penderecki's Agnus Dei (1981) was the most modernistic piece in the programme. Yet the expressive concepts behind its dense, dissonant harmonies are as romantic as Barber's.
Few Irish composers have matched Gerard Victory's ability to embrace and reject radical 20th-century techniques. His Songs of Lyonnesse (1984) draws on serial technique.
Yet in their approach to text setting, the ghost of Mahler lurks behind their sometimes over-obvious mix of representation and antithesis.
Alison Thomas and Fergal Caulfield (piano duet) stepped back into the 19th century via excerpts from Debussy's Petite Suite (1886-9). This and three pieces from Ravel's Mother Goose Suite were pleasing for natural pacing and shaping, even though balance was not always even.
The NCC was on good form in this concert. Perfect blend was needed and delivered in An Acclamation, which the conductor, Colin Mawby, composed for the recent funeral of Cardinal Hume.
The NCC also showed a welcome move towards making tone and style suit the period and place of the music concerned. In the Penderecki the tone was quite eastern-European and the attack rounded, while the more snappy approach to the Copland songs (with four-handed piano accompaniment), which ended the concert, felt as American as pumpkin pie.