NCH, Dublin

Mozart

– Magic Flute Overture.

Beethoven

– Piano Concerto No 5 (Emperor).

Berlioz

– Symphonie fantastique.

There are many, many things that can be asked and expected of a principal conductor, especially in the case of an orchestra with the word national in its title.

The Kazakh conductor Alan Buribayev is still some months off taking up his new role with the RTÉ Symphony Orchestra – his first concert as principal conductor is due on September 10th – but his two appearances with the orchestra last month, including the final concert of the orchestra’s season last Friday, answered some of the crucial questions.

Buribayev is one of those conductors who gives the impression of imposing himself on an orchestra, of insisting on getting what he wants rather than taking what the orchestra chooses or happens to give him in the first instance.

Friday’s programme was the first opportunity for an Irish audience to hear the orchestra’s new young conductor – he’s just turned 31 – in music from the classical Viennese repertoire.

His handling of Mozart's Magic Flute Overturewas intelligent, clear, zesty and without hangups. The orchestra may have been large in numbers, but this was big-band Mozart that was full in sound without being in any way heavy.

The natural manner and the acute sense of proportion that marked the Mozart was to be found also in Beethoven's Emperor Concerto, where French pianist François-Frédéric Guy was a commanding and noble soloist.

It’s going to be a while, though, before Irish audiences hear Buribayev again in this repertoire. The programmes he has chosen for his first season focus on romantic and 20th-century music, most of it from the Russian tradition.

The closing work on Friday was one of the great orchestral showpieces, Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique. Buribayev's performance was always keenly responsive to the still astonishing orchestral effects that the young Berlioz was able to dream up. But, as music-making, the whole was an uneven achievement.

The weaknesses were in the second and third movements, the Ball of the second sounding that bit too driven, too hectic, and the country scene of the third lacking in spacious atmosphere.

It was a real mistake not to have the offstage oboe properly distant, and even the effect of faraway thunder created by four kettle drums sounded rather too close.

The strengths of the performance were in the outer movements.

The reveries and passions of the opening were finely drawn and at the end the graphic March to the Scaffoldand Witches' Sabbathwere threatening and wild enough to bring many members of the audience to their feet.