Concerto Grosso in F Op 7 No 6.................................Locatelli
Concerto Grosso No 3...........................................Schnittke
Concerto Grosso in D Op 6 No 7.................................Corelli
Concerto in D..................................................Stravinsky
Concerto Grosso No 12..........................................Avison
Nicholas McGegan is the man of the future for the Irish Chamber Orchestra, taking up the position of music director just 15 months from now. The programme he chose for Wednesday's opening concert of the Debis AirFinance Killaloe Music Festival (of which he will also become artistic director) offered a clear foretaste of the challenges and rewards that may lie ahead.
The acoustic of St Flannan's Cathedral has proved difficult to master over the years of the festival's existence. A large black drape has now been suspended over the front pews to limit reverberation.
With McGegan exerting sharply etched control over his string players, and never pressing for raw volume, the resulting performances sounded more consistently apt in scale than has been the norm at this festival. Even yet, not everything comes clearly into focus. There's an effect not unlike the swallowing of vowels, with accents and peaks of phrasing masking what immediately follows. This, of course, may also have to do with the details of light and shade McGegan is seeking and the fact that baroque repertoire has hitherto been little explored by this orchestra. I think we can expect to see a growing accommodation between the ICO and the great masters of the baroque in the years to come.
The programme on Wednesday, a sequence of five varied concertos, was a fascinating one, contrasting baroque concertos by Locatelli and Corelli, and 20th-century works in which Stravinsky and Schnittke tried out a range of other people's hats, with, for good measure, a concerto created by the 18th-century Englishman, Charles Avison, after keyboard sonatas by Scarlatti.
McGegan characterised the music with a light and sprightly touch, a little too light, perhaps, for the extremes of the scary fun-fair ride in Schnittke's Concerto Grosso No 3 (where the sound of an electronic keyboard seemed no fair substitute for piano and harpsichord), but nicely dry in the studied formality of Stravinsky's finely-crafted Concerto in D. The work where everything seemed to gell best was the closing item. Avison's Scarlatti transformations were communicated with zest and Θlan, suggesting that the best fruits of the new partnership will be well worth waiting for.
