Serenade for strings - Wiren
Oboe d'amore Concerto in A - Telemann
Rhapsody for cor anglais - Jacob
Serenade for strings - Tchaikovsky
The four-day Killaloe Festival got off to a flying start last Thursday night with a strings and wind sandwich from the Irish Chamber Orchestra, whose creation the festival is.
The outer layers of the sandwich came in the form of two string serenades. Sweden's Dag Wiren (19051986) wrote the serenade which has remained his most popular work in 1937, after he had picked up a taste for neo-classicism during studies in Paris.
It's a rhythmically breezy work, with moments of delicate melodic and harmonic swoon. The ICO, directed from the first desk by Fionnuala Hunt, played it with full appreciation of its sensual allure, and in the Andante espressivo slow movement luxuriated in tone of deep-pile velvet.
Tchaikovsky's serenade encouraged a style that was harddriven, highly energised, extrovertly focused on delivering its message with a larger-than-life impact. Clearly, the Elegy of the third movement was evoked by gentler means, but exciting as was the journey through extremes, it was hard not to feel that a more balanced view would have produced music-making of ultimately deeper reach.
The soloist in the two concertante works was Thom as Stacy, cor anglais player of the New York Philharmonic, who showed that, as well as being a virtuoso of his instrument, he can do a good line in deadpan humour in introducing audiences to the distinctions between an oboe d'amore and a cor anglais.
He's a player who has a winning way with him, although his manner of ornamentation in Telemann could benefit from a refresher course in baroque style. The Rhapsody by English composer Gordon Jacob (1905-1984) is a slight piece, a skilful concoction of sweet nothings. Stacy's programme note enthuses about its "delightful touches and tunes in a moving poetry of sound" and it is his unusual gift as a performer to make those words sound true.
