Fresh Horizons, a damp-squib spectacular, and Andrew Litton’s dramatic debut

GARRETT Sholdice’s Horizons concert with the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra, ably conducted by Gavin Maloney (NCH, Tuesday), was a thought-provoking event. It set me thinking about composers, programming, how things are, how they were, and how they might be.

Composers write pieces. And programmers assemble them into concerts. That’s the way it works, right? Yes, pretty well. There are composers who perform, conduct, or work as the artistic directors of ensembles or festivals. But composers don’t often get the opportunity to bring to programming the concerns they might have in balancing, say, four movements in a composition of their own.

The kind of soul-searching that goes on over the ordering of the middle movements of Mahler’s Sixth Symphony – should the Scherzo or the Andante come first? (Mahler did both) – doesn’t seem to apply in the same way to most concert programmes. And for good reason too, a lot of the time. A large proportion of programmes are straitjacketed into tried and trusted formulas. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. If the familiar orchestral ordering of Overture, Concerto, Symphony has a high success rate with the public, whey meddle with it? If ordering the works in a recital in chronological sequence is sure and safe, why do things a different way?

In the old days, things were more fluid. Concerts were often bittier, and longer. The première of Beethoven’s Violin Concerto took place in a programme that included pieces by Méhul, Mozart, Handel, and Cherubini. The soloist, Franz Clement, offered some improvisations, and also played a sonata on one string, with the violin held upside down. Beethoven’s Fifth and Sixth Symphonies were premièred in an eight-segment, four-hour concert that also included the premières of the Fourth Piano Concerto and the Choral Fantasy.

Composers can control a full concert by writing a piece that's long enough. But there have been several who've tried to compose a concert. Igor Markevitch's La taille de l'Homme of 1937(only 50 minutes were completed), was planned as a through-composed, full evening concert tracking the span of a human life. In 2000, Kaija Saariaho wrote new music to link five works and create a theatrically conceived "visualised concert", From the Grammar of Dreams.Sholdice spoke from the stage to explain that this concert had been "curated as a single large work", and because of this he asked listeners to hold their applause to the end. The focus of the music was the chorale, and Sholdice provided orchestrations of chorale settings by Bach – his strings-only treatment of Ach wie nichtig, ach wie flüchtig(Oh, how fleeting, oh, how futile) alone was proof that Bach and the chorale still provide fertile ground for arrangers and re-workers.

He chose to open with a short elegy by Morton Feldman, Madame Press Died Last Week at 90, effectively a funeral march for the composer's piano teacher, one that hauntingly follows not a low tread, but a high one, on flute.

Benedict Schlepper-Connolly's new Last Picturesexplores a limited palette. Gentle repeating patterns for strings are commented on or interrupted from elsewhere in the orchestra, and after a climax topped by tam-tam, there's a spaced-out epilogue. The strategy was clear, but the material seemed too mundane.

Sholdice's Fall and Disappeartakes its title from the final stanza of Ach wie nichtig, permeating the Western hymn with the flavour of Javanese gamelan, and creating an ambulatory feel, taking the listener past the same landmarks in a way that forces fresh observations.

American composer James Tenney's 1974 Choralesis straightforward, sophisticated and fascinating, four iterations of a chorale that is created with a multitude of shadows, each iteration, as it were, differently lit. Here, the predictability of the shadowing was quite out of keeping with the nagging beauty it created. It was one of those pieces which amounted to far more than the apparent sum of its parts. And in terms of message and illumination, that was also true of the concert as a whole.

* With John Wilsonconducting the RTÉ Concert Orchestra in an all-American programme(NCH, Wednesday), svelte, elegant, well-polished music-making was to be expected. Wilson, the man who famously brought Hollywood to the BBC Proms a few years ago, is the orchestra's principal guest conductor, and he has not only a perfectionist ear but also the will to make sure he gets what he wants.

The high points of the evening were Gershwin's Piano Concerto, in which neither Wilson nor soloist Artur Pizarro unduly tried to classicalise the music's popular idiom, and the sweeping, swaggering Symphonic Dances from Bernstein's West Side Story: snazzy, swell, and punchy, too.

* The Dublin International Piano Competition's Piano Spectacular(NCH, Thursday) was a disappointment. The set pieces (Lavignac's Galop Marche, Dukas's Sorcerer's Apprenticeand Rossini's William Tell Overture) were all repeated from the 2008 Piano Spectacular, and the tuning of the all-Steinway setup quickly became spectacularly sour. The first half featured solos from six of the competition's first prizewinners, the palm on this occasion going to Pavel Nersessian in ruminative Medtner and witty Liadov.

* American conductor Andrew Litton's debutwith the NSO (NCH, Friday) was a genuinely spectacular affair. How could it not be? Shostakovich's LeningradSymphony was on the programme. Litton's pacing and scaling were exemplary, and he always seemed able to get that extra level of concentration and delivery from the players. But the Leningradremains overlong and overblown, a musical anti-climax after the first half, Beethoven's Eighth Symphony, was delivered with poise and brio.

* Mark Duley's Resurgam choiropened its three-concert Sacred Symphonies series at City Hall on Saturday. It's a lovely, atmospheric venue for programmes built around the polychoral music of Giovanni Gabrieli, who died, in his mid- to late-50s, in Venice in 1612. Saturday's programme, with organ interludes by Malcolm Proud, was thrustily sung, the ears having to follow, like spectators' gaze at a tennis match, the sound as it flew from choir to choir.

From the online archives

D Kern Holoman,who's written a history of Paris's Société des Concerts du Conservatoire, has made extensive documentation available online at iti.ms/yKHdWQ– try the opening, eight-item evening of March 9th, 1828 for starters.

The digital archive of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra( iti.ms/z8kGOM) runs from 1842 and has a phenomenal level of detail for the years 1943 to 1970.