The National Symphony Orchestra's Golden Jubilee concert on Saturday was an occasion which generated a swirl of mixed feelings. There was limited position accorded to contemporary Irish music - a specially-commissioned fanfare by John Kinsella and the Olympic Festival Overture by the late Gerard Victory.
There was the extraordinary decision to cold-shoulder Irish soloists and call instead on the services of Ilya Itin, first prizewinner of the 1996 Leeds Competition, and the Russian soprano, Galina Gorchakova, making a welcome Dublin debut, but in a group of Italian arias rather than the Russian repertoire for which she is so celebrated. And there was the strange choice of Respighi's gaudy Feste romane (the weakest of his Roman trilogy of symphonic poems) as the main musical meat of the evening.
Kinsella's Jubilee Overture for brass and percussion (including a line of bodhrans) rounded up a number of tunes of relevance to Irish broadcasting in a style somewhere between Riverdance and British band music.
Victory's overture is cast in a populist pastiche style. It lacks the brevity and snap, and also the sheer tunefulness, that are needed for success in such an undertaking.
Ilya Itin, who made a favourable impression in the Dublin piano competition in 1994 (where he was eliminated in the second round), performed the Grieg Concerto with an unusual air of detachment - super-chilled rather than cool - and with some disturbingly time-stilling hesitations in rubato.
Principal conductor Kasper de Roo, who didn't seem to find it easy to liaise with Itin, sounded altogether more comfortable with Gorchakova in arias by Puccini and Cilea. Apart from a few glitches in the latter's Io son l'umile ancella, her full-voiced, forward delivery and open emotional conviction constituted the highlight of the evening.
The closing Respighi, one of the crudest, noisiest scores around, was given with straight-down-the-line forcefulness by de Roo. The orchestra's response was firm - the players' collective potential is higher than it's been for years - but unsubtle.
