Irish Chamber Orchestra with Thomas Zehetmair
St Canice’s Cathedral, Kilkenny
★★★★☆
English music has never been high up the agenda in concerts by the Irish Chamber Orchestra. So it is quite a novelty for the ICO to open its concert at Kilkenny Arts Festival on Thursday with Vaughan Williams’s Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis and follow it with the first Irish performance of Errollyn Wallen’s Dances for Orchestra, a commission with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra and Swedish Chamber Orchestra that was premiered in Edinburgh last November.
The Tallis fantasia was also commissioned by a festival, the Three Choirs, for performance at Gloucester Cathedral in 1910. The music, which the composer later revised (the version we know today is from 1919), is based on a theme that Vaughan Williams had set to new words in The English Hymnal, and in the fantasia he scored it for the luscious sounds of two string orchestras and string quartet.
The piece almost has the spaciousness of a cathedral acoustic built into its stately pacing, as well as something of the swelling radiance of sound that cathedrals so readily provide. Hearing the warm account of Thomas Zehetmair, the orchestra’s principal conductor, in an actual cathedral is a real pleasure.
In 1998, Wallen, the Belize-born British composer, became the first black woman to have a work performed at the BBC Proms in London (more than 100 years into the festival’s existence); more recently she ruffled feathers with a reworking and rewording of Jerusalem for the Last Night of the Proms.
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Her new Dances for Orchestra are altogether less controversial, a buzzy, energetic, whirlwind dance tour, with contemporary rhythmic kinks and bright colouring, mostly agreeably upbeat but not particularly striking.
Zehetmair’s predecessor at the ICO, Jörg Widmann, favoured a highly pressured, fiercely driven and sometimes flat-surfaced approach to the Viennese classics. Zehetmair’s music-making is more measured and has more space, more time and much greater sophistication in expressive nuancing. That’s not to say that he shortchanges moments of climax. But the impression he makes is deep, detailed and unforced.
