National Gallery

FIRST GIVEN at last weekend’s Cork International Choral Festival, this recital by the National Chamber Choir of modern and contemporary works typified the programming savvy of the choir’s artistic director Paul Hillier. Items by Britten, Pärt and Gabriel Jackson mingled fruitfully with some from the distinctive Seminar on New Choral Music.

Hillier directed in Cork, but a flight cancellation put paid to the first repeat performance in Limerick. It also meant unanticipated promotion for chorus master Fergal Caulfield, who stepped in to conduct this second scheduled repeat.

There’s a huge difference between putting choral singers through their paces and securing unified timbre and compelling interpretation.

In the circumstances, Caulfield couldn’t be blamed for aiming at a point somewhere between those extremes, achieving ensemble singing that tended strongly to imply, rather than actually deliver, the music’s potential subtlety and excitement.

Jackson's lush setting of Robert Herrick's To Music, set a theme of literary connoisseurship that was taken up in the Britten/Auden collaboration Hymn to St Cecilia and in four works from Cork seminars.

Edmund Rubbra's Tenebrae(Third Nocturne), commissioned in 1962, gives neo-polyphonic treatment to a recherché liturgical text, while Poet in the Suburbs, written for the 1974 seminar by the festival's founder Aloys Fleischmann, ingeniously sets the sardonic prologue to Thomas Kinsella's Downstreamin mock-instrumental style.

A diptych commissioned this year from Roxanna Panufnik humorously takes the sensationalised banality of two poems by Wendy Cope to an almost surrealist plane.

Also from this year's seminar came the winning entry from the festival's newly reinstated Seán Ó Riada competition, With Heart and Soul and Voiceby UCC graduate Simon MacHale. A confidently visceral text, by the composer's sister Catherine MacHale, cannot have been the least of this edgily homorhythmic work's advantages over its 29 contenders.