Irish Timeswriters review the Galway Early Music Festivaland the National Concert Hall debut by the London Symphony Orchestra

Galway Early Music Festival, Collegiate Church of St Nicholas

For Galway Early Music's Pirates of the Corribean festival, the tearaway period-instrument ensemble Red Priest had a perfectly apposite programme - Pirates of the Baroque - that brilliantly fulfilled a promise of "stolen masterworks and long-lost jewels performed with swashbuckling virtuosity".

Whether it was Handel stealing from Hamburg colleague Reinhard Keiser, Giazotto counterfeiting Albinoni, or the performers themselves plundering Couperin, the members of Red Priest worked almost entirely from memory, and acted out the zany humour of their musical interpretations.

Recorder player Piers Adams and violinist Julia Bishop stalked each other like two courting insects, cellist Angela East slung her instrument horizontally like an electric bass, and harpsichordist Howard Beach stepped forward to declaim a brief but dramatic recitative.

In the hands of lesser musicians, these antics might have descended to the level of buffoonery. But with Red Priest, the execution is of too high an order for there to be any such risk.

The extremely free (and often extremely fast) pacing, the occasional incursions of Latin dance rhythms and Nymanesque continuo realisations, and the unorthodox use of instruments may not be the kind of things you'd want to listen to for too long, or too often. But they nonetheless define new limits for Baroque music's capacity as humorous and accessible entertainment.

In a late-night, candlelit concert, Scottish trio Canty's female voices found their element in the sparkling acoustics of St Nicholas Collegiate Church, coalescing into serene timbres that would be the envy of similar medieval music groups.

With atmospheric contributions from harpist Bill Taylor, their meditative succession of monastic chant and 12th-century polyphony from Ireland, Scotland and France included the first modern performance of a 15th-century office for St Patrick, recently brought to light by Ann Buckley.

Its newly resurrected melodies are fresh and dignified, and culminate in a sequence, Mente munda letabunda, that resembles, and is every bit as memorable as the oft-quoted Dies irae.

And in a happy resonance with the festival's theme, one of the chants recounting St Patrick's early life began "Hic incurso piratico". - Andrew Johnstone

Anderszewski, London SO/Chung, NCH, Dublin

Mozart - Piano Concerto in A K488. Bruckner - Symphony No 7

This belated National Concert Hall debut by the London Symphony Orchestra was delayed a further 15 minutes due to an Italian air-traffic-control strike. The programme went ahead without alteration although, understandably, the audience was ultimately unable to coax an encore from the players.

Soloist Piotr Anderszewski and conductor Myung-Whun Chung made an interesting chalk-and-cheese partnership in Mozart's Piano Concerto in A, K488. Chung's approach was straight and sharp. Anderszewski was like a clever interior designer, changing balances and details in ways that seem minor and yet can have significant, large-scale consequences.

Apart from the exaggeration of some over-done left-hand emphases, his approach was spry and individual, even coltish in response to the high-spirited invitations of the finale. The pianistic control, as ever from this artist, was impeccable.

Chung's Bruckner seemed something of a mismatch. The monumental grandeur of Bruckner's symphonic writing comes partly from the composer's boldness, even bluntness of gesture. He is indulgent in ways that were widely felt as improper in his time. He can harp on at what he likes, and he makes abrupt changes when it suits him. Chung seemed fully at ease in exploring the colouristic potential of the orchestration in the Seventh Symphony, but altogether less comfortable with the core musical content. His approach seemed to want the music to turn corners more elegantly, to bring a sense of cultivation to something which is by nature elemental. He wanted to manicure the roughness.

There were more specific problems, too. To take but two examples, he included the much-disputed cymbal clash in the slow movement, but then played down its effect, and he slowed down so much for the trio of the scherzo that all sense of momentum was lost. It was one of those performances where, even when the going was good, it was often going in the wrong direction. - Michael Dervan