St Ann’s Church, Dublin

Bach

– The Musical Offering BWV 1079

All 10 seasons of the Orchestra of St Cecilia’s Bach cantata series have supplemented five choral-orchestral programmes with a concert or two of the supreme master’s chamber music.

During the inaugural season back in 2001, two of the unaccompanied sonatas and partitas were performed by baroque violinist Maya Homburger, and the Goldberg Variations by harpsichordist Malcolm Proud.

Both artists returned for the current, concluding season, along with three other members of their international ensemble Camerata Kilkenny, to present one of Bach's most exalted contrapuntal testimonies, The Musical Offering.

Its chromatic theme, supplied by the musicianly King Frederick the Great of Prussia, acts as both seed and scaffolding for 16 movements: two of them ricercars (that is, researching fugues), four making up a trio sonata, and the remainder a miscellany of mind- bending canons.

The sonata calls for transverse flute (Wilbert Hazelzet), violin (Homburger) and continuo (Proud plus Sarah McMahon on baroque cello), while one canon is designated for two violins (Homburger plus Marja Gaynor). As regards the instrumentation of everything else, Bach gives the performers carte blanche.

Proud took the solo harpsichord option in volatile accounts of the two ricercars. Elsewhere, apart from some telling contributions to certain solutions of the two-part puzzle canon, his instrument was deployed as sparingly as possible.

This left room for a range of string and flute combinations, further varied by Gaynor’s switching to viola, in which one could take one’s fill of lively articulation, shrewd harmonic nuances and rich ornamentation – not to mention Hazelzet’s always- exquisite colourings.

Performances of this extra-special work can be sometimes illuminated, sometimes stultified, by an atmosphere of overpowering reverence.

Not so this one, in which the music’s artifices were subsumed in a world of rhetoric, decoration and dance.