It's always interesting at the start of January when the National Youth Orchestra and the National Symphony Orchestra play on successive nights. Last Saturday, the members of the NYO showed in abundance the qualities which, on the previous evening, the NSO had lacked: spirit and enthusiasm.
Grainne Mulvey's Horrendous Elation, The title, performed on Friday night, attempts to represent "the horror and excitement" experienced by the composer when witnessing a shower of shooting stars on a starry moonlit night. Atmospheric effects abound, from haloed groups of clusters, shifting accumulations of mass and wrinkled runs to exploding rockets of repeated notes. The general thrust of the gestural thought seemed clear, but the detail of the writing didn't always sustain the broader intention, with glissandos and tremolandos failing to find their mark at crucial junctures.
Mulvey's new work turned out to be the highest point in an evening of unstylishly lame music-making, in which conductor Robert Houlihan and orchestra failed to make much of either the secondrate Bernstein of the "Dance Episodes" from On the Town or the social realist conformity of Alexander Arutiunian's 1950 Trumpet Concerto, where the able soloist was the NSO's principal trumpeter, Graham Hastings.
The bad form of the evening was epitomised by the staggered ensemble at the start of Rachmaninov's Symphonic Dances, and a host of other details in the playing which followed. Houlihan's heavyhanded approach rather flattened out the shape of the music - with far too much emphatic clumping in cadential figures - but the quality of Rachmaninov's writing still managed to lift the experience clear of the troughs of the first half.
Michael Dervan National Concert Hall Enigma Variations . . . . . Elgar Rhapsody in Blue . . . . . Gershwin Petrushka (1911 version) . . . . . Stravinsky
On Saturday, the Russian conductor Andrey Boreyko, music director of Germany's Jena Philharmonic, principal associate conductor of the Russian National Orchestra and principal guest conductor of the Vancouver Symphony, led performances that had pace and fire. He didn't quite manage to keep the foreground clear of the orchestral undergrowth in the rich textures of Petrushka as Stravinsky originally conceived it. And he chose to abandon the score before its haunting end, favouring the truncated, loud round-off the composer provided for those who like their music to end with a bang.
The freshness of his approach was more persuasive in Elgar's Enigma Variations, although he never managed to get his young players to penetrate fully the soulful quality of the slower moments.
Peter Tuite, the winner of last year's RTE Musician of the Future competition, was the soloist in Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue. Tuite is certainly a young man who knows his own mind, and in the Gershwin he showed again his fondness for lingering over curiosities of detail, rather like a driver slowing down to take in the view. It's refreshing to find a young Irish player showing consistent individuality. Yet it has to be admitted that the continuity and integrity of the music did suffer seriously. Ultimately, Saturday's showing seemed less a cogent performance than the exhibition of a well-equipped young eccentric keen to point out the range of things he could find to do with Rhapsody in Blue.
