Symphony No 1 - Schubert
Piano Concerto No 3 - Beethoven
Symphony No 5 - Schubert
The last of the Orchestra of St Cecilia's three Bryden Thomson Memorial Concerts, presented in association with the National Concert Hall, took place on Wednesday, with Howard Shelley back on the podium, as in the opening programme.
Shelley has managed in the past to produce warmly musical results with the National Symphony Orchestra. But the smaller forces and different character of the OSC are much more demanding of a conductor.
Simply put, the OSC, which features many players who also work in the NSO, doesn't readily display the native responses of a good chamber orchestra. And the results achieved under Shelley have revealed roughnesses and approximations that Barry Douglas went some way to tidying up when he conducted the middle concert of the OSC's latest series.
The biggest problems on Wednesday came in Schubert's First Symphony, where the sound world was often tangled like roses on an overgrown trellis; the more familiar strains of the Fifth Symphony were delivered with a lighter and more persuasive touch.
Beethoven's Third was the piano concerto Finghin Collins played when he won the Clara Haskil Competition, in Switzerland in 1999. Wednesday's performance had the urgency of youth, though the pursuit of energy is not yet fully shorn of a tendency to plateau-rich phrasing. But the playing is tempered now with moments of inward stillness that suggest Collins's expressive vocabulary is continuing to expand.
