Barry Douglas's Camerata Ireland performing Beethoven at Castletown House

Camerata Ireland/Barry Douglas

Castletown House, Celbridge

Beethoven - Piano Concertos Nos 2, 4 and 5 (Emperor)

For a while in the early 1990s an extraordinary amount of money in Ireland was soaked up providing music in tents. First there were the Carrolls RTÉ Proms, held in a tent at RTÉ headquarters in Donnybrook.

Then there was the Adare Festival, held, with the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra in residence, in a tent on the grounds of Adare Manor.

The Wexford Festival's expensive sojourn in the grounds of Johnstown Castle last year was the most elaborate manifestation of a recent upsurge of opera in tents (though "temporary theatre" was the festival's PC description). And now, courtesy of the Office of Public Works, what you might call the back garden of Castletown House has got a tent all of its own, to service the needs of Barry Douglas's Camerata Ireland, which has been appointed the house's "resident ensemble".

The shortcomings of tents for making music are clear. The acoustics are usually dry, and the sound rarely well focused, either for performers or listeners. Sound isolation from the outside world is limited (wind and rain can play havoc, even in expensive set-ups), creature comforts are limited, and providing heat without attendant noise can sometimes be an insoluble problem.

On the other hand, the atmosphere is usually lively, and there's often a real sense of occasion.

Camerata Ireland offered three Beethoven concertos at Castletown, and anyone expecting the sorts of sounds to be heard in the orchestra's commercial recordings of these pieces will have experienced quite a surprise.

The orchestral playing in the second concerto, which opened the programme, was at times extremely rough. The ensemble was not tight at crucial moments in the slow movement of the fourth concerto, and the piano throughout was shallower in tone, especially in the bass register, than you'd expect given Barry Douglas's track record.

But Douglas, who directed from the keyboard, is a player who knows well how to live on the edge, and he showed a clear understanding of how concertos as consistently purposeful as Beethoven's can be driven with all the appearance of the music-making being a spur-of-the-moment creation. The awareness he created of how he was making everything happen was a key factor in the evening's high level of musical engagement.

MICHAEL DERVAN