From Renoir's Workshop - Victory
Piano Concerto - Poulenc
Firebird ballet - Stravinsky
The planning behind last night's National Symphony Orchestra programme at the NCH offered a familiar combination of good intentions and flawed follow-through that has marked RTE's artistic management of the orchestra over the years.
Yes, it was a great idea to put on Stravinsky's Firebird in the full and glorious exoticism of its original 1910 conception. But Colman Pearce didn't prove to be a conductor to respond sensitively to its luxuriance. More workmanlike than captivating, and simplistic, even, in his over-encouragement of sizzling percussion at climaxes, Pearce didn't capture much of either the magic or finely-detailed colouring of this, the earliest of Stravinsky's great ballets for Diaghilev.
Pascal Roge is about as experienced a Poulencian as you could get to mark the centenary of the birth of the French composer, which is being celebrated this year. The Piano Concerto of 1949, however, is the lightest and also the least of his concertos, clearly in need of deft and sympathetic handling. This it got from Roge, but the very heartiness of Pearce's partnership meant that the soloist's playing was frequently drowned out by the orchestra.
The late Gerard Victory's From Renoir's Workshop is a populist attempt to emulate the cheeky high-spiritedness which composers like Poulenc seemed to be able to capture with insouciant ease. Victory applied his colours and his touches of humour a lot more coarsely than his French models. And, though you might think a modicum of restraint would be just what this music might need, Colman Pearce demonstrated that an unbuttoned indulgence, magnifying the existing internal exaggerations of the score, can serve it really well.
