OSC/Barry DouglasNCHMichael DervanSymphonies 6 (Pastoral) & 7 ..........................................Beethoven

Beethoven's Pastoral is among the composer's most popular and easy-sounding symphonies, yet one of the most difficult to bring off in performance. It's an extremely tuneful work, yet so heavily dependent on repetition that, from a modern perspective, it could almost be regarded as proto-minimalistic.

In the second-last programme of his Beethoven symphony cycle with the Orchestra of St Cecilia, Barry Douglas gave the piece the kid-gloves treatment, handling it in a mostly gentle but diffident way. The performance fell somewhere between the extremes memorably characterised by Debussy, who complained about Felix Weingartner for showing "the care of a meticulous gardener" and ensuring that "Every weed, every caterpillar was painstakingly removed," and praised Gabriel Pierné, because "We really were in the country; the trees were not dressed in white ties . . . We could very nearly smell the stables!"

The Seventh Symphony has its own special challenges of rhythm and pacing, but survives a wide range of approaches with a robustness that the Pastoral cannot match. As in all the concerts of Douglas's Beethoven series, the music-making achieved higher levels of vitality after the interval. Diffidence was swept away and the music allowed to speak with directness and clarity.

Alan Smale (violin),

NSO/Gerhard Markson

NCH

Douglas Sealy

Octandre..................................................................................Varèse

Violin Concerto ...................................................................... Delius

Symphony No. 4 in E flat ................................................. Bruckner

The three pieces selected for Friday night's concert in the NCH made a strange mixture. Bruckner's Symphony No 4 is an enormous and colourful outpouring of energy whereas Delius's Violin Concerto struggles to contain the energy it possesses. Bruckner advances from climax to climax, with gentle interludes that enable him to regroup his forces for greater assaults; Delius is always retreating from his hard won climaxes - it is in the dying fall that the kernel of his thoughts is to be found. Varèse's aim is to create a new musical language and if he cannot completely win free from his predecessors he shows little interest in them. His Octandre, for seven wind instruments and double bass, has three brief movements all calculated to alarm the ear of a listener reared on more conventional harmonies, but under Markson's direction it had a logic of its own.

Alan Smale was the soloist in the Delius which is more of a meditation than a concert as the violin doesn't have an independent role, it is just the top melodic line. Smale played with attentive love and the orchestra which could easily have drowned him preserved a proper balance of sound, but somehow I did not get the impression of a unified conception.

With the Bruckner it was hard not to feel that the performers had returned to home ground and that the conductor felt free to urge the music along without constraint. There was huge enjoyment to be found in the sumptuous brass chords, in the refined woodwind contributions and the incandescent strings - particularly memorable was the passage where the violas have the tune, accompanied only by plucked strings. The whole was a triumph.

Sparklehorse

The Olympia, Dublin

Ed Power

are an idiosyncratic delight. Frontman Mark Linkous, a rangy southerner who surely boasts the tallest hair in independent rock, was a pioneering figure in the formative years of the nu-country movement, but has recently spurned clichéd Americana, indulging an appetite for frenetic speed garage that recalls sonic brutalists such as Throbbing Gristle and Big Black.

Unfortunately, his oblique, deeply personal compositions frequently falter in live performance. His music is a subtle pleasure, best appreciated in pensive solitude. On stage, Linkous touted an uncomfortable juxtaposition - interchanging furious punk workouts and mannered pastoral odes. Underscoring the uneasy nature of the compromise, he used a double-headed microphone, alternately cosseting his vocals in robotic static and a treacle glow.

In less accomplished hands, the set might have emerged a sodden mess - but Linkous's strident delivery transcended clashes of mood and temper. Accompanied by a lone drummer and a morose backdrop of video projections, he meted out gentle alt.rock and angry speed metal with diffident aplomb. Linkous dipped into a diverse back-catalogue, disinterring dusky cuts from last year's acclaimed It's a Wonderful Life album and robust numbers from 1998's dreamy breakthrough long player Good Morning Spider.

During a truncated encore, he appropriated a vocalist from support group Norfolk and Western. With her milky tones offering a tender counter-weight to Linkous's tattered singing, the moment was a triumph of evocative understatement.

Does it matter that Linkous too freely surrendered himself to the role of tortured introvert to fully acknowledge a breathless, reverential audience? Sometimes it's what you don't say that matters most.