Irish Timescritics review The London Irish Camerata at the National Gallery and the Ensemble Avalon at the Hugh Lane Gallery

Collins, London Irish Camerata/Sweeney
National Gallery, Dublin

Grieg - Holberg Suite. Mozart - Piano Concerto in C, K415. John Kinsella - Hommage à Clarence. Shostakovich/Barshai - Chamber Symphony Op 110a. Bartók - Romanian Folk Dances.
The London Irish Camerata, which was founded in 2005, made its Dublin debut at the close of its first Irish tour on Sunday.

The orchestra consists of 17 string players and is directed from the violin by Nicola Sweeney. It was brought into existence to provide opportunities for young Irish musicians based in London who are beginning to carve out a professional career for themselves.

The enterprise is clearly a laudable one, and the afternoon's music-making was full of surprises. Young musicians often bring off romantic music with greater ease than works from the classical period. But the London Irish Camerata performance of Grieg's Holberg Suite was actually less pointed and persuasive than the group's handling of Mozart's Piano Concerto in C, K415, with Finghin Collins as soloist.

There was a dynamism, even a ballsiness, in their playing of the Mozart, which communicated a richness of expression that might not have been expected from so small a group. And at the same time the always fluent Collins, playing back to the audience on a lidless piano, never had to struggle to be heard.

John Kinsella's Hommage à Clarence, a memorial to the English violinist, Clarence Myerscough, who died in 2000, was beautifully textured in its moments of stillness, and well-energised in its central evocation of a kind of post-Sibelian minimalism.

Shostakovich's Chamber Symphony, Op 110a (the arrangement for string orchestra that Rudolf Barshai made of the Eighth String Quartet), was delivered with dollops of a raw emotionalism that carried the day in spite of some moments of individual weakness in the playing. And high spirits were the order of the day, too, in the closing, no-holds-barred, rather raucous performance of Bartók's Romanian Folk Dances.

Michael Dervan 

Ensemble Avalon
Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin
Bernstein - Piano Trio.
Ravel - Piano Trio in A minor.
This programme of Ravel and Bernstein was the best of the French-American piano trio pairings presented by the Ensemble Avalon during its three-part winter series, An American and Paris.

The early Piano Trio by Leonard Bernstein is just as outré as those offered earlier in the series by Korngold and Paul Schoenfield. The crucial difference here is that however obscure the piece, the composer is not.

In 1937, the future composer of West Side Story was a 19-year-old music student at Harvard. It was during that autumn that he first met one of his great heroes, Aaron Copland, to whom he showed the trio and other student works.

What Copland couldn't have known then is that the trio's great exuberance was typical of what would come to be Bernstein's style. If not brash like some of his mature music, it is recognisably cheeky and irreverent, mixing elements as disparate as Bach-style counterpoint with Bartókian harmonies and impressionist textures, with a nod to the great American quest of the time to assimilate elements of jazz and blues into classical music.

It's not a great piece, but both fun and interesting to hear, given the life and career its author went on to have. And from a programming standpoint, this was the ideal occasion on which to perform it.

The Ravel Piano Trio, on the other hand, is a masterpiece of extraordinary beauty, and the kind of piece people fall in love with on first hearing (as I'd be willing to wager happened at this concert).

It exudes an impressionist perfume of unsettled metres, delicate colours, exotic references to Asian poetry, and a wide range of feelings.

In capturing and conveying all this, as well as the wit and energy of the Bernstein, the Ensemble Avalon demonstrated a concentration and an "A-game" which drew raucous appreciation from the Hugh Lane Gallery audience and which marks this fine young trio as one to watch.

Michael Dungan