Divertimento in D, K136 - Mozart
Sinfonia Concertante in E flat, K364 - Mozart
Chamber Symphony, Op 110a - Shostakovich/Barshai
The Irish Chamber Orchestra completed its Spring Series 99 at the Irish Museum of Modern Art last Sunday afternoon. The programme offered two string works - the most delightful of Mozart's early divertimentos and Rudolf Barshai's string orchestra arrangement of Shostakovich's Eighth Quartet - on either side of Mozart's Sinfonia Concertante for violin and viola, which adds pairs of oboes and horns to the strings.
The ICO's principal guest conductor, Bruno Giuranna, sounded fully in tune with the high spirits of the divertimento, steering away from the showily glittering brilliance that a number of visiting chamber orchestras have decked it out with, in favour of a lighter and airier approach.
Giuranna took up his viola for the Sinfonia Concertante, in which he was joined by the orchestra's leader and artistic director, Fionnuala Hunt, who did not here sound a natural Mozartean. There was a recurrent spikiness to her phrasing which didn't really match the more elegantly-conceived contributions of Giuranna.
With wind-players present (the oboes not always well-centred in intonation), one of the largest string complements the orchestra has fielded (19 players), and the conductor busy on his own instrument, there was at times a tendency for the textures to become thicker than Mozart surely intended. I suspect that, until more experience is gained, the orchestra really needs the full attention of a conductor in works of this nature.
Shostakovich's string quartets document areas of musical expression that he was well advised to keep as much as possible away from the intrusive attention of the Soviet authorities. The Eighth, with its many self-quotations and reference to the revolutionary song, Tormented by Grievous Bondage, is widely regarded as autobiographical, though the public front at the time of its composition on a visit to East Germany was the wartime fate of Dresden.
"The pseudo-tragedy of the quartet is so great", wrote the composer, "that, while composing it, my tears flowed as abundantly as urine after downing half a dozen beers."
If the original quartet is the autobiography, then Barshai's arrangement is the Hollywood epic based on it, the private anguish of the one turned dramatically public in the other. Shostakovich approved of Barshai's work, and he would surely have liked, too, the sensitive string mastery and potent emotionalism of the ICO's playing on this occasion.
