Summer Night in Madrid - Glinka
Les nuits d'ete - Berlioz
Symphony No 1 (Winter Dreams) - Tchaikovsky
The music at the heart of last night's NSO concert, the six, mostly melancholy Gautier settings of Berlioz's Les nuits d'ete, was the centrepiece of the programme in all senses of the word.
Ann Murray has never sounded so well in concert in Dublin as she did here, capturing with finely-nuanced freshness the forward-looking strangeness, or, if you prefer, the timelessness of Berlioz's imagination.
She commanded with ease the manner of natural simplicity which enables this music to sound with its full originality, and, if at climactic moments the tone sometimes hardened and the vibrato intensified unduly, this seemed but a small price to pay for singing that was so minutely responsive, and made its points with such unforced subtlety and rich but unshowy vocal resource. Anissimov and his players partnered her with apt sensitivity.
The Glinka and Tchaikovsky, which opened and closed the programme, were given clean readings, well disciplined, and neat in ensemble. The music-making worked at a lowish voltage, motivic repetitions frequently passing by without modification in tension or psychological significance. They're both pieces which need to be infused with a stronger sense of purpose and achievement than was managed by last night's honourable traversals.
