Little Music - Tippett

Two Portraits - Britten

Gloria - Handel

Dido and Aeneas - Purcell

Three of the pieces in the closing concert of the Debis AirFinance Killaloe Music festival were by men who would today fall into the category of young composers.

Britten was just 17 when he wrote his Two Portraits, Handel probably in his early 20s when he wrote his Gloria, and Purcell 30 when he wrote Dido and Aeneas. And although Tippett was some 11 years older, he was still in the early days of what would prove to be a long and fruitful career.

The greatest interest focused on the Irish premiΦre of the recently re-discovered Gloria, believed to have been written by Handel in Rome in 1707 or 1708. Mary Nelson was the soprano put through her paces by the intricate virtuosic figuration set above a string accompaniment that conductor Nicholas McGegan kept dancing on its toes. Nelson was game for all the extrovert challenges the music presented her with, though slightly less persuasive in the slower and more emotionally probing sections.

Surprising as it may seem, for me the Handel was quite outclassed by opening items by Tippett and Britten. 20th-century string repertoire has long been the Irish Chamber Orchestra's strongest suit, and Nicholas McGegan has already found a way of focusing and channelling the energy of the orchestra's often headstrong inclinations into a more balanced and subtly-shaded style.

The young Britten's Two Portraits of 1930 (the second a self-portrait) show a composer at once sophisticated and coltish. Tippett's Little Music of 1946 reveals altogether greater mastery. It may be a minor piece in Tippett's output, but side by side with the Britten, it says more with less effort and with an altogether firmer stamp of individuality.

Purcell's only real opera, Dido and Aeneas, is a work which is so full of good things it's always a bit of a surprise how it can disappoint in performance. On this occasion, McGegan's handling of the singers of the National Chamber Choir was a real pleasure.

His ability to keep the ICO within a stylistically appropriate framework was less consistent, and the solo singers split among a range of approaches.

At one end there was the operatically overbearing Grant Doyle as Aeneas. Wilke te Brummelstroete's Dido and Ethna Robinson's Sorceress were more operatically conventional, with Brummelstroete located in the more appealing and apt region of that continuum.

Only Mary Nelson (Belinda, and other roles) really sounded as if she was fully of the world that the orchestra and chorus were trying to create. McGegan, however, managed to retain a clarity that has been rare in larger works in Killaloe in the past.

Let's hope that the difficult acoustic there has finally been mastered. We'll only know for sure the next time the orchestra plays with a wind section in one of its festival concerts.

But the omens are good.

This closing concert of the Killaloe Festival was inadvertently omitted from earlier editions.