Irish Times critics give their verdicts.

RTÉ NSO/RTÉ Philharmonic Choir/Gerhard Markson at the National Concert Hall

Giuseppe Verdi's Il trovatore
One of the benefits of hearing Il trovatore in concert form is the absence of directorial madness, recent instances of which have included Azucena being gang-raped in Edinburgh and Luna's troops parading naked in Sydney.

But opera as a listening-only exercise puts a big responsibility on the conductor. At the NCH on Friday, Gerhard Markson, the RTÉ NSO and Mark Duley's RTÉ Philharmonic Choir rose splendidly to the occasion.

Markson paced the work intelligently and created pleasurable frisson in the aurally-spectacular ensembles.

The solo performances offered highs and lows, the former generated by the low voices and the latter by the high ones.

In the title role, David Rendal's covered tenor tones were anything but heroic, and he edged irritatingly in and out of tune all evening. But he contributed strongly to the big ensembles, and his quiet singing in the final scene was admirable.

Galina Gorchakova's sense of line and creamy middle notes remind one of her one-time status as a star at the St Petersburg Kirov. She impressed in her opening scene, in her Act 4 her confrontation with Luna, and in her final moments.

But her notes above the stave were too often spread, and her highest ones were alarmingly under-pitched.

By contrast, Simon Neal's villainous Luna was perfectly tuned and his focused baritone gave much pleasure.

As his henchman, bass Iain Patterson was incisive in declamation and articulate in negotiating the short quaver runs in his opening narrative.

The best performance of all came from Tichina Vaughan as Azucena. The role of the gypsy woman is one of Verdi's greatest character creations, and Ms Vaughan's vibrant mezzo enhanced every scene in which she appeared, most notably her harrowing Act 2 tale of burning the baby and the Act 3 episode where she is captured by Luna.

John Allen

Dublin Guitar Quartet at the Mermaid Arts Centre, Bray

Henryk Górecki - Quartet No 2 (Quasi una fantasia) (exc). Kevin Volans - White Man Sleeps. Leo Brouwer - Toccata. Four Guitars. Philip Glass - Quartet No 3 (Mishima). Leo Brouwer - Rumba.

Guitar quartets mark themselves out from other four-musician ensembles by their homogeneity. String quartets, saxophone quartets and vocal quartets are all family affairs, mixing instruments or voices across the range, and other groups are more diverse still. Guitar quartets, by contrast, offer a line-up of identical quadruplets.

The Dublin Guitar Quartet, formed in 2001, is a guitar quartet with a difference. Two of its members, Brian Bolger and Redmond O'Toole use so-called Brahms guitars, instruments with two extra strings, extending the range above and below that of the normal guitar. O'Toole even has a pin attached to his, so that he can play it upright, like a cello, with the pin placed on a resonating chamber, to enhance and amplify the instrument's tone. The other players, Pat Brunnock and Cian O'Hara, use conventional instruments.

There's actually no shortage of guitar quartets around the world, and Irish audience have in recent years been exposed to groups from Britain, Barcelona, Bratislava, and Paris. But the instrumental line-up is still new enough for repertoire to pose a considerable challenge.

The Dublin Guitar Quartet has bravely decided to dispense with the old-style, popular arrangements, and to stick entirely to contemporary music, including their own arrangements of works by living composers. Three of the pieces in Friday's programme at the Mermaid Arts Centre in Bray were arrangements, and the rationale behind some of their choices was given in announcements from the stage.

Kevin Volans's First String Quartet, White Man Sleeps, was chosen because its original version included plucked instruments, in the form of two harpsichords (the famous quartet version is itself an arrangement); and much of the music from which Philip Glass created his Third Quartet, Mishima, was originally heard on electric guitar in the film for which it was written.

No explanation was offered for the excerpts from Henryk Górecki's Second Quartet, Quasi una fantasia, but the attractions of sustaining the guitars' tone by pressing hand-held, buzzing electric motors to the strings, and the option of launching into a rock-group-like chordal attack probably had a lot to do with it.

The group's approach to the Volans and Glass arrangements was more contained. Tightness of ensemble seemed to be a greater concern than any moments of lyricism or ventures into expressive freedom. The tightness of focus paid off well in the evening's new work, Kevin Volans's Four Guitars, one of an ongoing series of Mermaid commissions. Here, Volans's current, pared-back style yielded repeated chords that generated something of the sort of spatialised and carefully proportioned sonic slicing that electro-acoustic composers are so fond of.

The work also made use of pools of silence, into which sounds of perfectly-formed delicacy were dropped.

The two pieces presented at the end of each half were a Toccata and a Rumba by Cuba's best-known composer Leo Brouwer, himself a guitarist. The Rumba's effects of jangly discordance, were hugely effective, a recreation on the guitar of the percussive distortions of the prepared piano. They served to round off an evening of unusual and stimulating cast.

Michael Dervan

Ulster Orchestra - Kenneth Montgomery at the Ulster Hall, Belfast

Liszt - Prometheus. Beethoven - Piano Concerto No 1. Mozart - Symphony No 39.

Like an evening-long 'Farewell Symphony', the orchestra required for this concert became smaller as the evening wore on. The oboes required for the Beethoven are not needed for the Mozart symphony, where the mellifluous sound of clarinets transforms the characteristic sonority of the classical orchestra. It's just a pity that the symphony's intimacy and expressive range should have been subjugated to the performance's unrelenting onward drive.

The opening item, Liszt's brooding and passionate Prometheus, was an enterprising choice as it's seldom done. There was plenty of attack here and Montgomery clearly relished getting to grips with the work's strong, dark sonorities. Unfortunately, the same rather sturdy approach was less apt in the classical pieces.

John O'Conor seemed hard-pressed in the outer movements of the concerto and was understandably not at his most effective, finding some of his usual form only in the slow movement and the long first movement cadenza. There were nervous moments, and the orchestra itself began to sound hurried in the final movement of the concerto and in the symphony, where the consistently fast tempi did make some points, but hurried past many more.

Montgomery deserves due credit for observing all the repeats, and there were passages where the warmth of Mozart's wind writing was allowed to come through.

The performance certainly did not lack nuance, but the evident intention to lighten the effect had to struggle against the prevailing metricality, and this remained a rough and ready performance.

Dermot Gault