Irish Times writers review ICO/Richard Lester, NCC/Antunes and Nersessian, RTÉ NSO/Anissimov.
ICO/Richard Lester
NCH, Dublin
Michael Dervan
Mozart - Adagio and Fugue in C minor. Boccherini - Cello Concerto in G G480. Stravinsky - Concerto in D. Brahms/Lester - String Quintet in G.
The Irish Chamber Orchestra is anchoring itself at the National Concert Hall for the Dublin legs of its spring concert season this year. Cellist Richard Lester is known to Irish audiences through his Boccherini quintet performances at European String Quartet Week in Cork last Easter, as well as appearances with the RTÉ Vanbrugh Quartet and at the West Cork Chamber Music Festival with his Florestan Trio. Here, he opened in fine style, with a performance of Mozart's grave and weighty Adagio and Fugue in C minor that made every note count. For anyone at the concert who had also attended Opera Theatre Company's new production of the 11-year-old Mozart's Apollo and Hyacinthus, the gap between youth and maturity could hardly have been more clearly drawn.
Boccherini's concertos demand an unusual kind of high-wire act from cellists. Lester has in abundance the necessary ability to be nimble in movement and graceful in phrasing in the upper reaches of the cello, an area where 19th-century composers usually only sent players in search of heart-on-sleeve passion. In his hands, the Concerto in G was a pleasure from beginning to end, airy and good-humoured, and also impressively stately in the slow movement's dialogue between cello and orchestral violins.
Stravinsky's 1946 Concerto in D needs to be tautly-sprung in rhythm and finely-balanced in chording if it is to avoid fully the pitfall of sounding like a highly skilful exercise in the composer's driest neo-classical manner. Lester and his players gave the impression of delighting in the music's inner workings. They pointed up its tartness, highlighted its dry wit, showcased its technical sleight of hand, and successfully sneaked in light touches of old-fashioned, expressive portamento.
Brahms's late String Quintet in G has an amount of tremolando-style scrubbing that can easily suggest that five instruments were but a poor substitute for the larger forces in his mind's ear. But giving the music those larger forces, as Richard Lester's arrangement does, is to produce an indulgent excess of sound while sacrificing the flexibility of interplay that's part and parcel of the original. As musical indulgence, it was a fun experience. But there are good reasons for it not becoming an everyday indulgence.
NCC/Antunes
National Gallery, Dublin
Andrew Johnstone
This was the National Chamber Choir's first collaboration with Ireland Promoting New Music. Six contemporary composers, three of them Irish, were represented.
Celso Antunes, the NCC's artistic director, is a conductor who gets what he wants: ultra-prompt entries, brisk tempos, in-your-face fortissimos, and sudden-but-sure pianissimos. In a very demanding programme, he secured astonishing technical achievements. Yet his absolute insistency could block the way between the music and the listener.
Aloys Fleischmann's setting of Poet in the Suburbs by Thomas Kinsella opened the concert in a spirit of high-end choral competitiveness. At this speed, there was fussiness in its detailed and variegated word-painting. In contrast, two movements from James Wilson's Almanac subjected Coleridge and Yeats to bland treatment. Here, the music seemed largely to annul the rhythm, phrasing and persona of the poetry.
By choosing the middle-English text Elde (Old Age), Siobhán Cleary has deftly placed issues of word-setting at a safe distance. Though this quaint medieval doggerel has a translatable meaning (incontinence, loss of hair, teeth and libido, and so on), its extinct vocabulary also makes for some handy onomatopoeia. The words thus have a symbolic function that doesn't impinge on Cleary's half-sung, half-spoken, abstract setting. The NCC gave it its first performance with conviction, holding out some promise for the use in live, real-time choral music of collage techniques developed in the sound-editing studio.
In Per Nørgård's Wie ein Kind, a score where madrigalism meets group-therapy, the singers were impressively uninhibited. In Zemgale by Peteris Vasks, their stamina was extraordinary. And with Ligeti's Wenn aus der Ferne, they confirmed that words can be more than a prop for the notes.
Nersessian, RTÉ NSO/Anissimov
NCH, Dublin
Andrew Johnstone
Beethoven - Emperor Concerto.
Shostakovich - Leningrad Symphony.
Given that conductor Alexander Anissimov has established his reputation on Russian repertory rather than on Beethoven, the two halves of the concert by the RTÉ NSO were more evenly matched than might have been anticipated.
Both he and soloist Pavel Nersessian agreed on a not-too-quick reading of Beethoven's Piano Concerto no 5, whose unauthorised nickname "Emperor" here conjured up images of grandeur and luxury as opposed to vigour and athleticism.
Nersessian tended to treat his accompanied passages (particularly the quieter ones) as delicate arabesques rather than brittle toccatas. But in the cadenzas he was authoritative, and in the adagio soulful. The orchestra was notably well-balanced, with a translucent violin sound, definition in the lower strings, neat ensembles (if not always neat intonation) from the woodwind, and sociable contributions from the brass. But some co-ordination problems in the concerto's first movement proved more than the players' evident co-operativeness could compensate for.
Team work and good orchestral timbres sustained much of the symphony. In the Bolero-like march at the centre of Shostakovich's first movement, a somewhat jaunty approach meant the music grew in loudness without developing the expected intensity. Nor, in the second movement, was there the crucial sense of paragraphing that comes from slight but secure tempo changes. But in the third movement, things changed. Conductor and orchestra seemed to bond, the largeness of his gestures eliciting an equal largeness of expression. With that emotional precision came a stronger impression of the music's architecture. Suddenly, Anissimov was back at his best.
