Michael Dervan reviews Okabe, NCC, RTÉ NSO under the baton of  Gerhard Markson at the NCH in Dublin while Martin Adams reviews the St Patrick's Cathedral Chamber Choir conducted by Andrew Mackriell atSt Patrick's Cathedral Dublin.

Okabe, NCC, RTÉ NSO/Gerhard Markson
NCH, Dublin

Debussy - Nocturnes
Markevitch - Piano Concerto
Stravinsky - Petrushka

The principal conductor of the RTÉ NSO, Gerhard Markson, was a pupil of the conductor and composer Igor Markevitch (1912-83), and, since 1999, he's been single-handedly engineering a Markevitch revival in the orchestra's programmes.

Friday's offering, an early, neoclassical Piano Concerto, first heard in London in 1929, proved to be a low point in Markson's Markevitch campaign.

There's a mechanistic streak in Markevitch's compositions which can be directly related to wider trends in the 1920s and 1930s. But in this teenage concerto the result is like dry, idle chatter, inconsequential commentary on material of no moment.

Nothing in Markson's tempered conducting, or the clean solo playing of Akiko Okabe, could do anything to rescue the piece. It was written in a period which produced celebrated piano concertos by Bartók, Stravinsky, Gershwin, Prokofiev, Ravel and Shostakovich, and Friday's performance made clear why, in the face of such elevated competition, it vanished.

Markson sculpted the opening performance of Debussy's Nocturnes with extraordinary care, showing great concern to pin down a wide range of orchestral effects in playing of sharp definition. The orchestra responded well, especially at the extremely quiet close of the second movement, Fêtes.

But there were passages which seemed simply too specific, as in the wordless female chorus (the National Chamber Choir), arrayed in a straight line across the front of the choir balcony, whose voices sounded too clear, too little blended, as if the idea were to offer an explicit come-on rather than a suggestive lure.

There was a different kind of explicitness in Stravinsky's Petrushka, which Markson conveyed with a brittle, angular energy, viewing the work from the perspective of the slightly later but altogether harsher terrain of Rite of Spring.

This approach downplayed much of the pathos that can be found in Petrushka.

But, happily, the highly evocative ending was handled with great sensitivity, and wove its own very special magic.

Michael Dervan

St Patrick's Cathedral Chamber Choir/Andrew Mackriell
St Patrick's Cathedral

John Richie - Lord, When the Sense of Thy Sweet Grace
Paul Crabtree - When David Heard
F Lachner - Stabat mater
Victoria - Tenebrae responsories (exc) Henryk Górecki - Totus Tuus

Geraldine McDonnell's premature death last January was a shock. In the late 1980s and early 1990s the choir she founded, Cantique, was a standard-setter in the performance and exploration of 20th-century music. None of Dublin's amateur choirs has really filled the space she and Cantique occupied.

Last Friday's concert by the St Patrick's Cathedral Chamber Choir was dedicated to her memory.

Many of the St Patrick's choir cut their choral teeth in Cantique. So this was a concert in which good memories, personal and professional, were mingled with sadness.

As Tim Thurston reminded us in his introductions, it was apt that the programme included Górecki's Totus Tuus, one of several works by eastern European composers that Geraldine introduced to Ireland.

St Patrick's Cathedral Chamber Choir is especially interested in contemporary music. Nevertheless, the choice of works shows a preference for music with a romantic sensibility.

For example, When David Heard by Paul Crabtree (b. 1960) is evidently inspired by 16th-century polyphony, and so economical with material that it seems to fill a tiny space with infinite permutations of warmly expressive gestures.

John Richie's Lord, When the Sense of Thy Sweet Grace is a spiced-up version of the late 19th century English partsong.

The choir was handicapped by the absence of one soprano, and that was especially evident in the complexities of Franz Lachner's Stabat mater and in some movements from Victoria's Tenebrae responsories. However, the latter included many moments that were memorable for all the right reasons.

Martin Adams