{TABLE} Siegfried Idyll .................. Wagner Pelleas et Melisande Suite ....... Siberius Symphony No 2 .................... Tchaikovsky {/TABLE} THE "Campus Classics" series of orchestral concerts has been publicised as "An informal introduction to Classical Music". The programmers have tended not to take the crowd pulling easy option, and equate accessibility with popularity: rather, they have gone for a mix of the familiar and unfamiliar. The policy seems to have worked, for the concerts have attracted fair sized audiences, and this included last Thursday's at the O'Reilly Hall, UCD, when the best known piece was probably Wagner's Siegfried Idyll.

It was therefore unfortunate that a lacklustre performance of this piece set the tone for most of the evening. There was no shortage of deft shapely playing from the RTE Concert Orchestra; but conductor Mark Shanahan seemed overabsorbed with detail. As the programme note remarked, the Siegfried Idyll is in three sections. In this performance it seemed to have many more.

Sibelius's Pelleas et Melisande suite needs playing which is both intense and amply shaped. We got some of the former; but the conductor produced none of the latter, and without the latter intensity has no purpose. So most of this vivid, evocative suite failed to make an impact.

The first and second movements of Tchaikovsky's Symphony No 2, the "Little Russian", suffered from similar problems, and sounded fragmented. Much the best performances of the concert were of the last two movements, where simple ideas and rapid tempo tend to generate a natural momentum. It was significant that in the Sibelius too, the most convincing playing came in the penultimate Allegro.