Michael Dervan reveiws Pavarotti at The Point in Dublin while Michael Dungan saw the NCC/Antunes at the National Gallery

Pavarotti, Remigio
RTÉCO/Magiera
The Point, Dublin

The great Italian tenor Luciano Pavarotti will celebrate his 70th birthday next October. Late last year he announced a worldwide 40-concert farewell tour, and he gave the first of two Dublin concerts on that tour at The Point on Thursday.

Such a tour is of course, the occasion for a sentimental reunion between star and fans as well as a last opportunity for anyone seeking to make a first acquaintance with one of the greatest voices of the 20th century.

The large venues (and associated big fees) that Pavarotti now favours give a better deal to the old fans than to the first-timers. The amplification on Thursday was, as ever, a distorting factor, making the piano accompaniment of the first seven items sound like anything but the concert grand that was actually on the stage.

Happily, the sound was kinder to Pavarotti himself. The great man spent the evening seated, mostly impassive, behind the piano, his great bulk partly masked by it, with a close-up video image projected on to a screen behind the orchestra.

On Thursday he sang with perceptible difficulty. The intonation was not always well-centred, the phrasing was short-breathed, the high notes rather rough.

Yet all the old instincts were there, the turns of phrase, the inflections that are uniquely his. But they revealed themselves in a way that was closer to suggestion than statement. The voice was Pavarotti's but the control was limited, and the tone but a shadow of its former glory.

It would be a pleasure to be able to report that in some number he transcended the limitations he currently labours under. But he didn't.

The singing served as a reminder of the great achievements of the past, but it didn't at any point actually recreate them.

Pavarotti's partner for the evening was the Italian soprano Carmela Remigio, whose contributions had all the youthful freedom of vocal manoeuvre to set the pulse racing in a way that's now denied her eminent colleague.

Leone Magiera conducted as well as I've ever heard him, securing moments of sharp characterisation from the members of the RTÉ Concert Orchestra. Pavarotti announced the third encore as his last, and still he hadn't got around to singing Nessun dorma. That calling-card aria had brought his last appearance in Dublin to a triumphant close. I left with the audience's applause ringing in my ears, happier to cherish the old memories than run the risk of having them replaced by something inferior.

Michael Dervan

NCC/Antunes
National Gallery, Dublin

Thursday's concert opened with a joust, 12 wild minutes of lively extended allegory complete with fanfares, the galloping of hooves, the clashing of lances and the commentary of the crowd as first Adam and then Christ competed against Lucifer.

All this action and atmosphere were brought vividly to life not on the cinema screen nor in a symphony concert, but by 17 unaccompanied voices performing music - La Justa - written five centuries ago by the forgotten Spanish composer Mateo Flecha.

To the great credit of the National Chamber Choir and their artistic director Celso Antunes, there was no sense of reverentially dusting off a crumbling manuscript from the Museum of Choral Obscurity. Rather, the performance was robust and laced with fun.

Spain was the first port-of-call in what was the first concert of the choir's summer series Mare Nostrum, an exploration of music old and new from the Mediterranean. Also from Spain were samples from the sole-surviving copy of the 16th-century collection Cancionero del Duque de Calabria. The four anonymous villancicos or Spanish madrigals demonstrated light choral textures and interplay to rival those of Weelkes or Morley.

From France, after music by Josquin, came the chill and the poignant juxtaposing of snow's beauty and the horror of war in the tonally-stretched harmonies of Poulenc's Un soir de neige, composed in Paris in 1944. And the programme's first great contrast came courtesy of the whispers, bitter-sweet dissonances and extremities of vocal range in Pascal Dusapin's Umbrae mortis.

The Italian segment opened with Gesualdo and continued with short intense works by Luigi Nono - his virtuosic 1960 Sarà dolce tacere for eight voices in which he reduces Cesare Pavese's radical left-wing verse to mere sounds - and Luigi Dallapiccola, his 1970 Exhortatio, a gripping, almost overwhelmingly violent protest against the fighting in the Middle East.

This was a diverse, excellent programme superbly performed.

Michael Dungan