With a new sponsor, AerFi, a new seating arrangement in St Flannan's Cathedral, and an enthusiastic, full house for its final concert, the Irish Chamber Orchestra's Killaloe Music Festival has an air of real permanence about it. Placing the musicians on a well-raised platform has removed the worst of the acoustic problems of the festival's earliest days. The Irish Chamber Orchestra is still basically a string orchestra, and when wind players are brought in for larger works, this shows. The string playing tends to lose some of its equanimity, and responses within the wind section can vary quite a bit. So the all-Mozart closing concert of this year's festival, given under the ICO's principal guest conductor, Bruno Giuranna, was something of a curate's egg. Giuranna's musicianly direction promised pleasures that weren't always realised with equal success in the playing.
The great G minor Symphony seemed to settle as it went. But in the Requiem, the National Chamber Choir's tendency to overshoot climaxes went mostly unchecked, and the compositional unevenness of Sussmayr's completion was more pronounced than usual. The resonantly stylish bass baritone Christopher Purves, was the strongest of the team of soloists, with tenor Robin Tritschler his usual reliable, but frustratingly understated self. Soprano Carol Smith and mezzo soprano Barbara Rearick both sang with a stronger sense of purpose, but without consistently resolving the conflicting Mozartean demands of expressivity and formal balance.
