Reviews of the Killaloe Music Festival, pianist Krystian Ballière in the John Field Room, and the Ulster Orchestra at the National Concert Hall.

Killaloe Music Festival

Killaloe, Co Clare

By Michael Dervan

The Irish Chamber Orchestra's Killaloe Music Festival ended with a curate's egg of a concert. Conductor Nicholas McGegan chose to open with the chamber music version of Wagner's Siegfried Idyll. This birthday surprise for the composer's wife Cosima is one of the most gorgeous of Wagner's creations, and also one of the most elusive in performance - its calm is as difficult to sustain as its effusions of joy. The ICO's performance under McGegan was uneasy.

There was passion aplenty let loose in Elgar's Introduction and Allegro. The musicians played their hearts out, but the edges were very rough, the sound full of strained effort, as if from a wild attempt to venture into areas of expression and tonal depth beyond the reach of the numbers on the platform.

The arrival of mezzo soprano Ann Murray and the return to McGegan's home turf of baroque repertoire elevated the evening onto an altogether higher plane. Murray in Handel - she sang four arias from Giulio Cesare, Alcina, and Ariodante - is a selfless performer, who gives herself over to character and dramatic situation. She brings Handel to life with an extraordinary immediacy that's governed by perceptive musicianship, acutely responsive phrasing, and a rare magnetism which compels attention.

To be sure, some of the louder moments were coarser in tone than they used to be, but her fearlessness in Handelian leaps is electrifying, and her ability to draw the listener in with what seems like the plainest of presentations was as impressive as anything at the more exciting end of the scale.

From an often thrilling encounter with Ireland's leading Handel singer, the orchestra moved on to Haydn's Symphony No. 8, Le Soir.

McGegan was here in his element and the orchestra rose in style to most of the soloistic challenges presented by the work - although the double bass solos, while strong in rhetoric, were less than reliable in intonation.

Of the remaining festival concerts that I heard, the candlelit programme from Cathal Breslin (Schubert's Sonata in A minor, D537) and the Clare String Quartet (Mozart's Quartet in F, K590) was disappointing.

Breslin sounded altogether too four-square, even to the point of missing out on the magic of Schubert's sudden harmonic shifts. The quartet's leader was rhythmically unsettled in the Mozart, allowing too many short notes to be swallowed in the shadows of longer ones. The potential of this new ensemble is clear, but this performance of Mozart revealed important issues in need of addressing.

The concert by the Rothko String Trio (Cliodhna Ryan, violin, Cian Ó Dúill, viola, Clare O'Connell, cello) offered playing in Schubert (the Trio in B flat D471) and Beethoven (the Trio in G, Op. 9 No. 1) that was in many ways less polished than that of the Clare Quartet, but also often better balanced in outcome. They were at their best, however, in Judith Weir's lightweight Bagpiper's String Trio of 1984, so it's not surprising to learn that work by contemporary composers features strongly in their current schedule.

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Krystian Ballière (piano)

NCH, John Field Room, Dublin

By Martin Adams

Kinderszenen - Schumann, Sonata in B minor - Liszt

There was loss and gain in a change from the advertised programme for Krystian Ballière's piano recital. Liszt's Piano Sonata, the one-movement cyclic work to which most others aspire, was to have been preceded by the piece which influenced it most, Schubert's Wanderer Fantasy. Instead, the concert opened with the opposite pole of early-19th-century cyclic form, Schumann's collection of memories, Kinderszenen.

Ballière was born in London, and within my experience can be relied on to produce intelligent music. He is less interested in impressing his audience than in every detail of the music, and in placing that detail in context. His technical command is not spectacular, yet is more than sufficient for his musical ambitions and he is especially good at controlling tone and at differentiating lines in complex textures.

The Schumann was beautifully done, with the seventh of the 13 character-

pieces, Traumerei (Dreams), treated as the centre-point around which Schumann's imagination pivots. Silence, and the pacing and character of each piece, in comparison with its neighbours, were all well-judged to create a complete picture.

Equal intelligence was applied to the Liszt sonata, one of the most thought-out pieces in the romantic piano repertoire. This was an intensely yet subtly goal-driven performance. The frills of virtuosity were kept in their place and although this work's extraordinary contrasts were not as surprising as they can be, they were purposefully laid out. It was an absorbing account from a musician who is almost a model of the thinking person's pianist.

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Hatfield, UO/Braithwaite

NCH, Dublin

By Martin Adams

Maskarade Overture - Nielsen; Capriol Suite - Warlock; The Lark Ascending - Vaughan Williams; Peer Gynt Suite No 1 - Grieg; On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring - Delius; Finlandia - Sibelius

The Ulster Orchestra's programme here was on the long side for lunchtime, but pleasantly varied, and Nicholas Braithwaite showed a steady hand in conducting Scandinavian and British music from the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Sometimes it was too steady for dance pieces like Grieg's Anitra's Dance from Peer Gynt and Peter Warlock's Capriol Suite, both of which needed a little more characterisation of rhythm, and for Sibelius's Finlandia, which needed that edge of passion which can make it such a rousing experience.

Nevertheless, this was a rewarding concert of well-

rounded music-making. One of the most striking aspects of the Ulster Orchestra's playing was the ability to maintain steady tone when playing really quietly. That was a telling asset in one of the best performances of the concert, a beautifully seamless and shapely account of Delius's On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring.

Another merit was the impeccable balance and rhythmic control shown in Nielsen's Maskarade Overture, which all too easily can be a gabble of loud ideas.

In Vaughan Williams's The Lark Ascending the violin solo was taken by the orchestra's leader, Lesley Hatfield. Her beautifully sinuous playing had surprising tension. Instead of the dreamy, amorphous atmosphere often associated with this example of English pastoralism, there was subtle ecstasy. The neat, co-ordinated orchestral contribution suited this approach perfectly - the earth-bound watcher in George Meredith's poem responding to the soaring energy of the rising bird.