Some magical moments

{TABLE} Introduction and Allegro......................Elgar Les illuminations.............................Britten Je goute le jeu...............................Fergus Johnston Metamorphosen.................................Strauss {/TABLE} FERGUS JOHNSTON'S new Je goute le jeu is a set of variations written for the 16 strings of the Irish Chamber Orchestra. The work was premiered in Limerick on Wednesday, heard in Galway on Thursday and performed at the National Concert Hall last night.

On a first hearing, the carefully balanced effect of so much of the writing seemed to me to be rather undermined by two elements, the overuse of glissandos (recurring with an effect of moustache-on-all-the-ladies surrealism), and the extreme dissipation of the closing pages, a venture into controlled aleatoricism which rather lost its way. Played without a conductor, the piece offered the most finely controlled and tonally focussed playing of the evening.

Conductor Nicholas Kraemer's return to Strauss's Metamorphosen (he conducted it with the ICO back in 1991), flowed more smoothly this time around, but he still seems at a loss in placing climaxes in the larger scale of things, and allows the piece - most unjustly - to seem meandering and excessively long.

Elgar's Introduction and Allegro and Britten's Les Illuminations both scored more highly for vivacity than for subtlety. The forcefulness employed didn't always result in the requisite massiveness of tone in the Elgar. And in Britten's extraordinarily resourceful Rimbaud settings the orchestra too frequently challenged the audibility of the soprano soloist, Suzanne Murphy. It was good to hear Ms Murphy in an orchestral context away from opera and oratorio. In spite of some magical moments, though, she didn't on this occasion make the territory sound fully her own.