Irish Timeswriters review The Eternal Femininethe last concert in the National Chamber Choir's series.

NCC/MacKay, National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin

Maconchy - Siren's Song. Marian Ingoldsby - Mar a fuarthas spreagadh. Nicola LeFanu - The Silver Strand. Maconchy - Nocturnal.

Gráinne Mulvey - Stabat Mater. Maconchy - Creatures (exc).

The last concert in the National Chamber Choir's series, The Eternal Feminine, featured music by women composers with strong Irish connections. In general, the challenges of a demanding programme were well-met by the choir; and Brian MacKay's conducting gave each piece a convincing character.

Elizabeth Maconchy (1907-94) was born in Buckinghamshire to Irish parents. Especially after the second World War, she attracted international attention as a composer of instrumental music, and as a strong, individual voice with a striking ability to combine modernity and traditional technical discipline. She was an excellent contrapuntist, and that was one of the consistent strengths of her three choral works on this programme - Siren's Song (1974), Nocturnal (1966, and commissioned by the Cork International Choral Festival), and four of the seven songs from Creatures (1980), which ensured a good-humoured ending to the concert.

All the music on the programme, including the three works by living composers, had roots in common.

Elizabeth Maconchy was Nicola LeFanu's mother, and the Irish composers Marian Ingoldsby and Gráinne Mulvey are former pupils of LeFanu. Beneath their distinctive styles lies a common belief in the value of craft and of line in vocal music.

LeFanu's The Silver Strand (1989) is an evocative piece that makes it plain that it is a lullaby sequence, without resort to over-obvious referencing.

Marian Ingoldsby's Mar a fuarthas spreagadh (1993) is subtitled "a response to Munch's Scream", and sets Eithne Strong's poems with a sensitive awareness of their vocal possibilities.

On the surface, Gráinne Mulvey's Stabat Mater (2003, and also for the Cork festival) was the most extreme work on the programme.

But it works very well, for here too craft is a priority: its dense clusters are impeccably crafted, via a strong harmonic sense and an ear for subtle colour. - Martin Adams