Hugh Lane Gallery Gerald Barry – Beethoven; O Lord, how Vain; The Coming of Winter; First Sorrow; Schott and Sons, Mainz.

Gerald Barry seems to have been haunted with Beethoven in recent years. He wants to write an opera with Beethoven as its subject, and has begun skirting the composer's life by writing settings of his letters.

The baldly titled Beethoven, a setting for bass and ensemble that includes the famous reference to the "immortal beloved", was first heard in 2007. And the new Schott and Sons, Mainz, for bass and choir, was premiered by Stephen Richardson with the National Chamber Choir under Paul Hillier at the Hugh Lane Gallery on Thursday.

Barry's Beethoven is very much a man rather than an icon, an individual cut down to everyday size in terms of his personal weaknesses and strengths.

He is bullying and emollient. He is manipulative and clearly feels put-upon. He is burdened by thoughts of conspiracies, proof- reading problems, his health, the tragic attempted suicide of his nephew.

Barry is anything but shy in presenting Beethoven's mundaneness. And he does so with a strangely flickering surreal touch.

Richardson's voice came across in the confines of the Hugh Lane Gallery with the power of a bellow, presenting a character with a mind that mostly races and is easily provoked.

The choir whistled and hummed and whispered. They picked out individual words and reinforced the soloist like a kind of musical dayglo marker. They sang stray, high notes, that pierced like blinding spotlights. They spent a protracted time breathing methodically, as if in acknowledgement that even a genius as clearly energetic and driven as Beethoven had to rest and sleep.

Even though the performers fought shy of some of the score's most extreme demands of trills and falsetto, they still conveyed the impression of giving it their all. The effect was wild, rambunctious, touching.

The earlier Beethovenworked less well. The instrumentalists of the Crash Ensemble were coarse and unreliable in delivery (the brass were particularly fallible), though Richardson's delivery of the soaring, plunging vocal writing was again an astonishing tour-de-force.

The concert also included the affecting string quartet, First Sorrow, which has the performers sing to their own accompaniment, the stately, gravely medieval-sounding O Lord, how Vain, where both the general tenor of the music and text's disdaining of pleasure are undercut by jolly whistling, and the forwards and backwards excursions of The Coming of Winter, which sometimes sounded like a riotous, wordless dance.

– Michael Dervan