Academic Festival Overture - Brahms
Irish Rhapsody No 6 - Stanford
Francesca da Rimini - Tchaikovsky
Bartered Bride Overture - Smetana
Concerto giocoso - James Wilson
Choral Fantasy - Beethoven
Alexander Anissimov and the members of the National Symphony Orchestra joined forces with musicians from the Royal Irish Academy of Music last Friday night in celebration of that institution's 150th anniversary.
Rather in the manner of house concerts at the Academy over the years, there were more works on offer than might have been expected, and greater concern was shown with providing a performing platform for a range of individuals than with the musical shape of the evening as a whole.
I'm not sure that the sixth of Stanford's Irish rhapsodies was quite the piece to show the talent of violinist Anne Phelan in the most sympathetic light. The livelier writing of the second half seemed to find her more at ease than the slower music which preceded it.
The very title of James Wilson's specially commissioned Concerto giocoso and the use of a solo group of five wind instruments (the Academy's Esposito Quintet) suggested a fizz and froth of which the composer has shown himself capable in the past but which his strangely low-key new work failed to deliver.
Anissimov stirred the tempests of Tchaikovsky's France- sca da Rimini with a tidy-minded control which seemed to keep the music's swirling passion mostly on too tight a rein. On the other hand, in the closing pages a bit of restraint on the orchestra-obliterating enthusiasm of the cymbal player would have been welcome, as would (as so often in this orchestra) something more definite and assertive than the soft contours favoured by the timpanist.
The Academy's director, John O'Conor, was the piano soloist, firm in broad outline if not always fine in detail, in Beethoven's Choral Fantasy. Anissimov approached this with appealing robustness and a specially assembled RIAM choir and group of soloists took to their task with enthusiasm.
Each half of the evening opened with a festive overture, and it was here that the musicmaking reached its highest peaks, Anissimov finding a lightness of texture that's not to be taken for granted in Brahms's Academic Festival Overture and delivering the overture to Smetana's Bartered Bride with a dancing spring and swagger.
