Suite No 3 in D - Bach
Cantata 80, Ein feste Burg - Bach
Magnificat - Bach
The late Hans Keller, a musical commentator with the sharpest of tongues, liked to pillory what he called "phoney musical professions", among which he numbered viola players, opera producers, conductors, music critics, musicologists and professional broadcasters.
At the core of Keller's broad attack was his tenet that "in order to prove its phoniness beyond reasonable doubt, a profession has to create grave problems which it then fails to solve". If conductors in general fall into his net, what, then, is to be made of specialists such as those who work in opera or with choirs?
As a group, choral conductors often deal well with their choirs when it comes to the quality of the singing itself. Things that might have been on composers' minds rather than the singers', however, tend to fare less well. And a choral conductor in front of an orchestra is a subject that would surely have given Keller a field day.
It was the conductor of Tallaght Choral Society, Grainne Gormley, who set these thoughts in motion. She opened her concert at the NCH on Thursday with a roughly-judged performance of a purely orchestral work, Bach's Third Suite (the one with the famous Air), sometimes flaccid, sometimes overdriven.
However, when her choir launched into the opening of Cantata 80, Ein feste Burg, you could sense the dynamism which must make her a real pleasure to sing for. There wasn't much variety of app roach in the singing, but it was shaped and delivered with enthusiasm and energy, especially in the closing Magnificat; the Orchestra of St Cecilia, inevitably, was left to play a secondary role.
The team of soloists included James Huw Jeffries, a counter tenor who sounded neither secure of technique nor pleasant of tone, and Declan Kelly, a tenor whose self-evident potential doesn't yet encompass the rhythmic control needed in baroque music. The two sopranos, Sinead Pratschke and Sylvia O'Brien, and the baritone, Jonathan Gunthorpe, sang with surer style and stronger vocal appeal.
