NCH, Dublin

Chabrier – España. Debussy – Iberia.

Bizet/Sarasate – Carmen Fantasy.

Saint-Saëns – Havanaise.

Debussy – La Mer.

THIS WAS the first evening event in the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra’s summer season of “Musical Postcards” – geographically-themed, low-price, low-budget concerts with mostly short pieces and extracts from bigger ones.

This one was billed “France Spain”, with five out of six composers coming from France, and all but one piece connected to Spain. The opener was Chabrier’s España, a short, colourful symphonic poem matching his detailed diary entries from Spain during a four-month visit there in 1882. Next was Iberia, the second and most popular of Debussy’s three-part Images, itself in three short movements.

Too bad there were no printed programme notes or spoken introductions, or even a listing of Debussy’s evocative movement titles: “On the highways and byways”, “The perfumes of the night” and “A holiday morning”.

The price of cost-cutting is an unwelcome widening of the gap between a composer’s intentions and the audience’s perception.

Neither piece ever really came to life. Conductor John Finucane – the NSO’s fine principal clarinetist gamely taking the podium before his colleagues – seemed to know the scores and what he wanted to do with them, yet directed with a critical shortfall in energy.

The Irish violinist Elizabeth Cooney was soloist in Sarasate's Carmen Fantasy,the Spanish composer's show-boating violin fantasy on famous themes from Bizet's Carmen.

Cooney often successfully navigated Sarasate's virtuosic challenges, but never with much fire, and she landed in difficulties in the habañera. It was a concert crying out for a shot of caffeine when Cooney arrived, but she could only join the status quo.

Happily the big work in the second half – Debussy's three symphonic sketches inspired by the sea, La Mer– was in a high class of performance. Far more complex and nuanced than anything in the first half (but also compromised by the lack of programme notes), La Mer's layers and intricacies seemed to waken something in Finucane and the NSO who did a good job of depicting the play of the waves and the shifting time- periods and moods of the sea.