NCH, Dublin

Philip Hammond – Waterfront Fanfares;

Flute Concertino; Die ersten Blumen;

. . . the starry dynamo in the machinery of night . . . ; . . . while the sun shines (in memoriam H.H.H.)

Tuesday’s RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra Horizons programme was given over to the work of Belfast composer Philip Hammond, who celebrated his 60th birthday last Thursday.

Hammond describes his music as “retro-romantic, totally accessible without a hint of incomprehensibility”. And he also describes himself as “an occasional composer”, not because he composes only occasionally, but because so much of his music has been written for specific occasions.

The influences that he openly declares include Ravel, Debussy, Poulenc and Rachmaninov, and he describes John Adams as his hero. Tuesday’s pieces also provided some whiffs of Barber and Copland.

The earliest of the featured works was the Flute Concertino, written as a Sonatina with piano for James Galway in 1978, and orchestrated for a BBC celebration of seven decades of broadcasting in Northern Ireland in 1994. It was delivered with aplomb by Catriona Ryan, and set out the composer’s stall pretty effectively, light and buoyant in tone, crafted with care and imagination, but a little fluffy in substance.

That fluffiness resurfaced in . . . the starry dynamo in the machinery of night . . . , written for Barry Douglas and Camerata Ireland in 2001, and premiered in the presence of Bill Clinton on the occasion of his being conferred with an honorary doctorate by Queen’s University, Belfast. The musical influences were aptly American, from the TV shows of Hammond’s childhood, but the insistent focus on humdrum repeated chords for the piano soloist (Roy Holmes) seemed like a waste of a good opportunity.

Hammond's minimalist leanings were altogether more effectively revealed in . . . while the sun shines (in memoriam H.H.H),a BBC Radio 3 commission for a celebration of Irish orchestral music in 2005, which the composer was asked to relate to the Northern Irish composer and conductor Hamilton Harty. The blurring of lines between Irish tunes and material from Harty's work had something of the fascination of those crossword-like squares filled with letters within which a maze of hidden words can be found.

Even more persuasive was Die ersten Blumen (The first flowers), which was written for an Ulster Orchestra tour of Germany in 1996. This mostly downbeat response to a poem by Hermann Hesse moved with a slow, sometimes swelling drift, before blazing into a sudden climax.

Conductor Gavin Maloney took a peculiarly unyielding approach, wanting in subtlety of shape and nuance, to the concert's the opening work, the Waterfront Fanfaresfor wind and brass, which were written for the opening of the Waterfront Hall in Belfast in 1997. His handling of the other pieces was altogether more refined.