Suite of Irish Airs - May
Cello Concerto - John Kinsella
Scherzo - May
Ulster Airs - Trimble
Three Irish Pictures - Victory
To mark St Patrick's weekend, RT╔ chose an Irish programme for the NSO and offered at the NCH on Friday the earliest orchestral work of Frederick May, a new concerto by John Kinsella, and sets of arrangements by May, Trimble and Victory.
Kinsella's Cello Concerto was commissioned for the Mexican cellist, Carlos Prieto, current owner of a Stradivarius cello.
Kinsella's two-movement concerto is in the pared-back style he now favours. The spareness and restraint of the writing could be felt even in the freedom of the opening movement, which is on the arabesque side of rhapsodic; the temperature is slightly higher in the more demanding writing of the faster movement which follows. Prieto is an intelligent and sensitive performer, but he could be heard to struggle from time to time. The concerto sounds very much as if it's designed to allow the soloist to mark it with a distinctive personal character. The orchestra is mostly cast in a supportive role, and the solo writing, however virtuosic, is conceived with gestures so plain that even the slightest deviation can readily be spotted. In this premiΦre performance, Prieto seemed too mild-mannered, content to let the music speak for itself when it needed a stronger, oratorical presence.
Conductor Robert Houlihan took an unbending approach to Frederick May's 1953 Suite of Irish Airs, and thereby seemed to attenuate the gentle wistfulness of the music's softly dissonant harmonies. Three tunes arranged by Joan Trimble in the 1930s adhered more closely to the conventions of the genre and seemed to be more deeply felt.
Gerard Victory's Three Irish Pictures of 1980 are highly self-conscious reworkings, gaudily coloured and rhythmically tricky, exploring the panoply of the modern orchestral palette to address an audience of a later age.
Frederick May's 1933 Scherzo is, in spite of its title, a portentous piece, or so it seemed in this performance, blunt in gesture, stodgy in harmony, but intriguing all the same.
