Various venues, Kilkenny

Festival choruses have been around for a long time. But what made the new Kilkenny Arts Festival Choir different was that it brought together singers, without restriction on age, from around the country for workshops and rehearsals, leading to performances of Beethoven’s Choral Fantasy and Rossini’s

Stabat Mater

.

The Choral Fantasy is a strange Hydra. It opens with a long, improvisatory piano solo, turns into a set of variations with orchestra, and by the time the team of vocal soloists and choir join in, it sounds like nothing more than a dry run for the choral finale of the Ninth Symphony – Beethoven actually described the symphony to a publisher as being “in the manner of my piano fantasy with chorus”.

Saturday’s pianist was Finghin Collins, a bit too musing in manner in his opening solo (improvisations that sound uncertain as to where they are heading sound a lot less impressive than ones which exude confidence), but was a rock of strength thereafter.

The orchestral playing under Fergus Sheil may have sounded a little too regimented, and the vocal soloists (soprano Aileen Itani, mezzo soprano Bridget Knowles, tenor Christopher Lemmings and bass Graeme Danby), who were placed behind rather than in front of the orchestra, seemed rather recessed. But once the choir raised their voices to sing in praise of the joys of art, the work ended in a blaze of glory.

For many people, Rossini's Stabat Materis one of those questionable Italian religious works which bring too much of the secular flavour of the opera house to a sacred text.

It actually begins appropriately. But the brooding of the opening movement yields to rum-ti-tum accompaniments and a theatrical ardency which continue to divide listeners even in the 21st century – back in the 1890s, George Bernard Shaw pilloried it as “the spavined cheval de bataille of obsolete Italian prima donnas and parvenu Italian tenors”.

Whatever its aptness for the text, the famous tenor aria Cujus animamdidn't have much of a chance in Saturday's performance. Christopher Lemmings offered a weak and tremulous tone and tried to hang on to a high D flat that sounded to be quite outside his grasp on this particular occasion.

The bass, Graeme Danby was a lot more solid, but the evening’s solo glories came from the commanding expressiveness of soprano Aileen Itani, whose duet with Bridget Knowles also glowed beautifully. Fergus Sheil got good singing from the choir, though once again he seemed reluctant to let the music breathe with sufficient freedom.

On Sunday morning, in the Parade Tower of Kilkenny Castle, the Lendvai String Trio brought infectious enthusiasm to a wonderfully varied programme, a youthful, thoroughly over-the-top trio by Sibelius, a melodically voluble but harmonically bland trio by Jean Cras (1879-1932), a man who composed in the gaps afforded by a full-time career in the French navy, and the second (and least frequently heard) of Beethoven’s early String Trios, Op. 9.

Kilkenny 2010 Highlight:The Cardinall's Musick's stirring and illuminating programme of choral music by Tallis and Byrd in the Black Abbey.