Six Bagatelles - Ligeti
Trois Pieces Breves - Ibert
Sextet - Poulenc
La Cheminee Du Roi Rene - Milhaud
Quintet No 1 - Francaix
The Music in Great Irish Houses series continued this year's French theme with Thursday's concert. In an unfamiliar venue, the Daedalus Wind Quintet played music written between 1930 and 1960, mostly by French composers.
The chapel's pews are uncomfortable, but the surroundings are striking and the acoustics quite good.
The concert opened with Ligeti's Six Bagatelles, an equivalent for wind quintet of Beethoven's late bagatelles for piano: short, concentrated and full of meaning. The other music in the programme was invariably well crafted, but it was lighter.
Poulenc's Sextet, for which the wind players were joined by the festival's new artistic director, the pianist Hugh Tinney, aims to be one of that composer's more substantial works of chamber music. But it merely strikes poses.
The other large work on the programme, Francaix's Quintet No 1, is ultimately more successful because it has fewer pretensions.
Ligeti is one of the few who has added to the wind-ensemble repertoire as Mozart did. The most absorbing works apart from his were Ibert's Trois Pieces Breves and Milhaud's La Cheminee Du Roi Rene, which make posing a virtue by being collections of short character pieces.
The players in the Daedalus Wind Quintet are principals in the National Symphony Orchestra. There was plenty of technical security and much of the playing had an appropriate "go for it" panache.
But music of this kind also needs finesse: really quiet playing, deftness with balance and colour, and a general air of polish. These were intermittent qualities throughout the concert.