St Ann’s Church, Dublin. Tarik O’Regan – Acallam na Senórach

Less austere than an Arvo Pärt, less self-consciously spiritual than a John Tavener, British composer Tarik O’Regan is putting a rather more sophisticated edge on the comfort zone of contemporary choral music. In return, he’s held a series of prestigious university fellowships, been nominated for two Grammy awards, and ranked in the press with Tallis and Vaughan Williams.

It was thus quite a coup for Ireland’s National Chamber Choir to give the first performance of a work nearly three times the length of anything else in O’Regan’s catalogue.

Still, the choice was obvious. Paul Hillier, the NCC’s artistic director and principal conductor, recorded O’Regan’s

Scattered Rhymes

with the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir in 2008. And the new 55-minute setting draws its text from the 12th-century Middle Irish narrative

Acallam na Senórach (The Colloquy of the Ancients).

The work is laid out as an almost unbroken sequence of six selected exchanges between St Patrick and his warrior friend Caílte. Two of these involve also the musician Cas Corach, whose playing of the dulcimer is represented by amplified acoustic guitar. A pair of lightly touched bodhráns adds a dash of insular flavour in the prologue and epilogue.

In between, five short settings of stanzas in Middle Irish, three energetic guitar interludes and a Latin Paternoster are outlets for O’Regan’s talents as a choral and instrumental miniaturist, at times suggesting a certain indebtedness to Anúna and Riverdance. Connecting these sections, however, are swathes of varied yet dutiful choral recitative that make heavy weather of the modern English of Ann Dooley and Harry Roe.

The performance at St Ann’s Church was a triumph of sustaining power for Hillier and the NCC, who during the long silences of guitarist Stewart French maintained pitch and tone quality almost as if in the studio conditions to which

Acallam na Senórach

is probably best suited.