Concerto for Guitar and Strings - Benjamin Dwyer

Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten - Arvo Part

Percussion Concerto - Benjamin Dwyer

Last Tuesday's concert in the Horizons series was a reminder of an obscure craze of late 18th-century music. In concertos for 10 or 20 timpani, the attraction lay more in watching the virtuoso dash up and down the platform than in the music, which soon slipped into well-deserved oblivion. But spectacle remains an element in any percussion concerto.

Benjamin Dwyer's concerto, an RTE commission which was premiered in this concert, has a good balance in that respect. The enormous battery of instruments explores subtle possibilities as well as the brash, and while Richard O'Donnell's athletic prowess was worth watching, it was the music which mattered. This piece is inspired by Hindu cosmology, and makes a vivid impact. The vocabulary is decidedly modern; but many of the ways in which the concerto is shaped are not. It tends to accumulate tension through rising sequential repetitions, as Wagner, Liszt and Strauss do. The technique can be effective, but used so pervasively it becomes limiting.

Similar methods of expansion can be heard in Dwyer's Concerto for Guitar and Strings, in which the composer was the soloist. But there, with a more restricted range of orchestral colour, they are more obvious.

The National Symphony Orchestra was in strong form and the clear and confident conductor was Nicholas Kok. He was right, after Arvo Part's Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten, to look pleased with the playing of the NSO strings and the solitary bell (Martin Metrustry). As Dwyer himself said, a perfect piece of music.