The "American night" at the National Concert Hall last Friday offered music by Adams, Bernstein, Copland, Gould, Gershwin and Gruber. The last of these composers, who is Austrian, was represented by Radio City (from Manhattan Broadcasts), an affectionate exploitation of the jazz style that made Bernstein and Gershwin sound tame and colourless. Gruber resisted the temptation to weave a languorous melody of romantic antecedents through the jazz elements, and the RTE Concert Orchestra, with the addition of four saxophones, a drum kit and other percussion, entered wholeheartedly into the spirit of the thing. The plucked double-basses at the start were almost a guarantee of authenticity.
The Chairman Dances (Foxtrot for Orchestra) by John Adams was played with similar gusto and plenty of colour so that its minimalist repetitions did not pall. What did pall were the gentle evocations of urban domesticity to be found in Copland's Suite from Our Town, though it did the composer no service to programme the Suite with the other works, which were of a markedly extrovert nature.
Andrei Roudenko (piano) was the soloist in Gershwin's Variations on I Got Rhythm and in Morton Gould's Interplay. His crisp articulation brought air into scores that were in danger of being suffocated by their own noise.
Colman Pearce invited the audience to join in two shouts towards the end of Bernstein's Overture: West Side Story (arr. Peress) and the party atmosphere thus created could be said to have imbued the whole concert. This ended with Gould's Latin-American Symphonette, a sprightly series of dance movements (rhumba, tango, guaracha and conga) which must have set many a foot tapping.
