Variations on Mollie Malone - Clarinet Concerto - The Children of Lir - Robert Lamb
For over 40 years, Robert Lamb has worked with musicians as eminent as Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong. In recent years this Cork-born trombonist, composer, arranger and conductor has become a writer of symphonic music, and it was in that guise that he conducted the National Symphony Orchestra at the NCH last Friday night.
Taken as a whole, the programme showed a chameleonlike compositional variety. Each piece is a concept, and one gets the impression that Lamb can turn to the one as readily as the other. The Variations on Mollie Malone are taut and short. The Children of Lir, which was premiered in the NCH in 1994, is prolix; and not just because it lasts around 75 minutes.
The printed programme described it as a tone poem for large orchestra and narrator. However, the role of music is far more depictive than narrative. The text, which was delivered with style by Frances Tomelty, carries everything. Lamb shows a flair for evocative music - the occasional sentimental use of Irish melody notwithstanding - and can write in an individual way when he chooses. Yet the overall effect is closer to the traditions of film music than of concert music.
It was in the Clarinet Concerto, which was receiving its first performance, that compositional practice and artistic concept were most congruent. Owing much to big-band and jazz, and not a little to art music, this is a concerto between contrasted styles and textures, as well as between orchestra and soloist. John Finucane relished the fireworks of the clarinet part, and the whole piece has a compositional panache - especially in its use of concentrated, bigband, big-gesture rhythm and texture - which persuades, despite problems with sustaining ideas across a large span.