Ulster Hall, Belfast
Fanny Mendelssohn — Overture in C. Felix Mendelssohn — Athalia Overture. War March of the Priests. Elaine Agnew — Strings A-Stray. Ina Boyle — Violin Concerto. Harty — With the Wild Geese.
THE ULSTER Orchestra’s outgoing principal conductor Kenneth Montgomery was on top form at the Ulster Hall in Belfast on Friday.
The programme was a most unusual one, pairing pieces by brother and sister, Fanny and Felix Mendelssohn, and providing a rare opportunity to hear Irish orchestral works from the first half of the 20th century, one of which, the 1933 Violin Concerto by Ina Boyle, was being performed for the first time.
Montgomery got right inside the music of the two Mendelssohns, delighting in wind-rich colours and textures that so often pass by as a kind of poorly focused background blur. Felix's rarely heard Overture and War March of the Priests from Athalia(incidental music for Racine's play) are better structured than Fanny's Overture in C, which, although it strays off the point rather too often, does so with a brio that, at least in Montgomery's hands, was thoroughly infectious.
Ina Boyle (1889-1967) is a composer who is not even a name to most Irish music lovers. She lived all of her life in Enniskerry, but made visits to London, where she took lessons from Vaughan Williams. Her orchestral work The Magic Harpwon a Carnegie Trust award and was published by Stainer Bell (she was the only woman to have such a success with the trust), and the popularity of her anthem The Transfigurationled to a front-page story in this newspaper in December 1922.
The Violin Concerto comes across as mostly rhapsodic in nature, the opening chorale-like ruminations of the orchestra broken into by sometimes ecstatic excursions by the soloist, the finale’s rustic dance ending in a way that’s so oddly inconclusive it may well have impeded the work’s acceptance in the 1930s. Boyle successfully managed to have a rehearsal read-through by the BBC, but this did not lead to an actual performance, although Friday’s premiere was actually part of a free BBC invitation concert.
Montgomery and the often honey-toned soloist Catherine Leonard delivered the piece with loving care.
Montgomery's approach to the minimalist dancing of Elaine Agnew's 1994 String A-Straywas to seek out the tension of an off-centre equilibrium rather than any form of more secure anchoring. The approach was greatly to the music's advantage.
The concert ended with Hamilton Harty's 1910 With the Wild Geese. Montgomery and his players fully engaged with the composer's skilfully sketched, romantically expansive programmatic concerns, sparked by Emily Lawless's poems about the Battle of Fontenoy in 1745.
