At the Shannon International Music Festival in Limerick, Michael Dervan finds the Irish Chamber Orchestra at a crossroads.
The Irish Chamber Orchestra is a high-achieving orchestra. Yet there's a sense in which it has been stuck at a crossroads for years. And there's also a sense in which it has, paradoxically, never quite recovered from the move to Limerick in 1995, which was the lever to its current success.
The Irish Chamber Orchestra as we know it is a strings-only group, leaving it with a native repertoire which is mostly either 18th-century or 20th-century, with only a handful of pieces from the core classical and romantic periods. The pre-1995 ICO was a chamber orchestra with wind and brass players, and the whole of the smaller-scale orchestral repertoire was open to it.
This year's Shannon International Music Festival, the orchestra's annual festival in Limerick, showed the orchestra's difficult present and its expected future at either end of the programme.
The opening concert, which I wasn't able to attend, featured string orchestra arrangements of Sibelius and Dvarionas, some original Grieg and a violin concerto by Latvian composer Peteris Vasks.
The closing concert included that magically-textured strings-only ballet score, Stravinsky's Apollon musagète, the Irish premiere of Thomas Adès's Violin Concerto, Concentric Paths, written for the ICO's artistic director Anthony Marwood, and the most famous and most popular symphony of all time, Beethoven's Fifth (its inclusion warranted by the scoring of the Adès, which calls for a Beethoven-sized orchestra including wind and brass, but with the addition of percussion).
In the right hands, Beethoven's Fifth is one of the most rousing pieces in the orchestral repertoire, and Paul Watkins's sharply-etched, cogently-driven performance brought the Limerick audience to its feet.
The RTÉ NSO last year gave us a portly, Germanic Beethoven cycle under Gerhard Markson. Watkins and the ICO suggested how much more exciting a slimmed-down approach, with a crucial re-balancing of weight in favour of wind over strings, could be.
The Adès concerto is a work of slowly surging background currents, of orbital patterns which, musically speaking, have something of the anchoring force of a chaconne. Along with these, both with them and against them, is interwoven writing of much more frenetic character, the soloist covering the gamut of virtuoso technique. Yet the concerto, which Anthony Marwood delivered with unfailing authority, turned out to be one of those pieces where the significance of the process involved seemed to outweigh any sense of statement or conclusion.
Paul Watkins and the players of the ICO conveyed as sharp a perspective of the Adès as the soloist. Watkins's account of the Stravinsky, a work memorably summed up by its choreographer Balanchine as "white on white", seemed by contrast to want to wring too much direct expression from the music's highly-formalised melodic construction. The more you press this music, the less it tends to yield.
The main thematic strand in the festival concerts that I caught between Friday and Sunday was a Russian one. The Lege Artis Chamber Choir from St Petersburg under Boris Abalyan sang excerpts from Rachmaninov's 1910 Liturgy of St John Chrysostom in a late-night, candle-lit concert, and offered a full evening programme called From St Petersburg With Love, featuring Orthodox music (early psalm settings and 20th-century pieces) and a selection of secular work.
To a Western sensibility, the Russian music on offer involves a frequent inversion of the vocal and choral norm. The unusual vocal feats are not the upward excursions of the sopranos but rather the downward extension of the bass line, down below low Cs to regions most singers can only dream of. This choir delivered those special thrills with abundance.
The St Petersburgers' second programme included the more varied musical range, but it was the mostly slow, spare and meditative Rachmaninov which made the more profound impression - and it was the Rachmaninov, too, which gave the greatest exposure to those spine-tingling low notes. Sadly, the audiences was deprived of the benefit of knowing what the choir was singing about. Neither texts nor translations were provided at either concert, just the names of the individual items.
Happily, the audience for soprano Alison Roddy's lunchtime performance of Shostakovich's Seven Romances on Verses by Alexander Blok did have printed translations, and Roddy handled the vocal demands ably, considering she was suffering from a cold. Her range of expression and dynamics, however, was narrowed in a work that under normal circumstances does not fight shy of extremes.
Her partners in this cycle were the ever-reliable Anthony Marwood, visiting young cellist Bartholomew LaFollette (whose solo recital showed him to better effect in Brahms and Glazunov than Beethoven or Mendelssohn) and pianist Caroline Palmer (who also offered some stylishly tart performances of rarely-heard piano pieces by Stravinsky).
The other two concerts I heard were odd add-ons to the festival programme, misfits, really. The showcase recital for participants in the Opera Ireland master classes with Gwyneth Jones is a worthy event, but its standards proved to be way out of line with the rest of the festival programme. The voice of greatest promise in this year's line-up proved to be soprano Naomi O'Connell.
And the National Youth Symphony Orchestra under Atso Almila, appearing in the festival for the first time, also seemed out of place. It was good to have the opportunity to hear Finghin Collins friskily relishing the challenges of Prokofiev's Third Piano Concerto. But the youth orchestra has been playing independently in Limerick at the end of July for years. So their inclusion in a festival which in the past has had guests of the calibre of Maria João Pires, Stephen Kovacevich and Ann Murray, could only seem to have been made possible by the exclusion of something better and more established.
