St Patrick’s Hall, Dublin Castle

There should be a health warning issued for the Music Network’s annual end of year excursions from the Coach House of Dublin Castle to the grander surroundings of St Patrick’s Hall. Yes, there’s free drink and finger food. But there is also an interminable-seeming speech from Music Network chairman Peter Finnegan before the musicians are allowed on stage. And there was a lot of redundant chit-chat from soprano Cara O’Sullivan and pianist Ciara Moroney, too.

This might all have seemed a little less intrusive had O’Sullivan been on better form. She had false starts to two songs, dropped another one, due, she said, to end-of-tour fatigue, and genuinely showed signs of that fatigue in an evening with an uncomfortable number of cracked notes and some not quite centred intonation.

The night began badly, with an account of Henry Purcell’s

The Blessed Virgin’s Expostulation

, in which voice and piano seemed to be inhabiting different musical universes – the duo used the realisation by Benjamin Britten.

The group of Schubert songs (

Der Musensohn, Litanei, Ganymed, An die Musik

, and

Versunken

) were all too often perfunctory in effect, with the vocal line frequently marred by hardness of tone and swallowed vowels. Both performers sounded altogether more at home in Debussy’s

Ariettes oubliées

, O’Sullivan finding moments of real vocal enchantment, and Moroney offering well-balanced harmonic support.

The highlight of the evening came in the opening song of Aloys Fleischmann’s

Trí hAmhráin

, a setting of Carolan’s

Lament for Owen Roe O’Neill

in which the singing for the first time achieved a sense of direct personal involvement. Rodrigo’s

Cuatro madrigales amatorios

sounded rather too plain to yield their intrinsic charm, but both the group of songs by Reynaldo Hahn and the closing selection of songs by opera composers (Gounod, Rossini, Bellini and Verdi) had moments which suggested the evening that might have been, flashes of the easy vocalism and expressive point which O’Sullivan usually has at her command.

- MD