Michael Dervanreviews the Irish Chamber Orchestra at the MBNA Shannon International Music Festival Limerick
"Wild and Eclectic", was what the advance billing promised. And wild and eclectic is what the Irish Chamber Orchestra offered at the MBNA Shannon International Music Festival on Thursday.
The concert, given in the University Concert Hall in Limerick, was directed from the piano by Joanna MacGregor, a musical eclectic who swaps styles as readily as a swinger does partners.
On Thursday she opened with the young Benjamin Britten's "fanfare", Young Apollo. Its exuberant atmosphere is its strength, but also its weakness - it effectively dances on the one spot for all of its short duration. With MacGregor it functioned like a clearing of the throat for the next offering, three Dowland arrangements, where MacGregor's approach to this early material ranged from the simple and direct to the loose and jazzy.
Her second set of arrangements, of tangos by Astor Piazzolla, gave her even greater freedoms, and the more she stirred up the music's darkness and dissonance, the more the audience seemed to like it.
The programme also offered two concertos. One was from the 18th century, Bach's Concerto in D minor, BWV1052, where MacGregor's playing was simply too pianistic to represent accurately a part conceived for the harpsichord. The other was altogether more recent, the Second Piano Concerto by James MacMillan, first performed in its final version as a ballet for the New York City Ballet in 2004.
It's a work of wild, dizzying, slithering, sliding, bulldozing dances, tight in rhythm, but not always predictable in exact step.
MacMillan provides some contrast in the form of dreamy, frilly writing for piano, and ends (after a turn on side-drum by the soloist) with the fist-pounding thunder of a demented cadenza. If this were a film, and you caught it in the middle on television, you would take it to be the work of a director with the strange fantasy of a Tim Burton.
The festival day on Thursday closed with a song recital of Schumann and Debussy, given by the confident, technically-assured and clear-voiced mezzo soprano, Paula Murrihy, partnered by a sometimes too competitive- sounding Caroline Dowdle.
