The Irish Youth Wind Ensemble's concert on Thursday began in jaunty style, with a piece by a composer from Luxembourg, Marcel Wengler. Asked for a piece by a small town band, he produced Experiments On A March, of which the first movement (which is what the IYWE played under William Halpin), is cast as a typical band march, but with some modernist imperfections insinuated into the clockwork.
It was among the more successful items in a concert where the ensemble (which, of course, changes in personnel from year to year), was in less than its best form. The collective weaknesses tended to mask the individual strengths within the ensemble in all save the most extrovert works, Nigel Clarke's drum-led Samurai (conducted by James Cavanagh), Francis McBeth's Melville-inspired Of Sailors and Whales (Halpin).
The promised premiere of Fergus Johnston's specially-commissioned Wind Symphony was truncated to a performance of the second and third of its four movements. Johnston made no concessions to the abilities or experience of the young players in his lugubrious second movement "Dirge", formed like a tangled chain out of overlappings of two-note motifs. This movement not only challenged the players, it got the better of them, and the rhythmic intricacies of the "Drainmusic" which followed would have needed a lot more confidence in delivery to sound really effective.
Including Richard Strauss's early Serenade was a nice idea. The composer was just 18 when he wrote it, and, with its scoring for just 13 instruments, it could have given the top players in the group a chance to shine. But the roughness of intonation and ensemble vitiated the value of the exercise for the audience.
Holst's Suite in E flat and William Schuman's New England Triptych fared rather better, but neither the elaborate arrangement of "Elsa's Procession" from Wagner's Lohengrin nor Percy Grainger's smart and saucy arrangement of his own Country Gardens escaped the basic technical problems that were obvious whenever the harmony and rhythm were straight and clear.
