{TABLE} 5 Movements for strings Op 5 ............. Webern 3 Pieces in Old Style .................... Henryk Gorecki Fratres .................................. Arvo Part Cantus in memoriam Benjamin Britten ...... Arvo Part For France and strings ................... Dirk Brosse Holberg Suite ............................ Grieg Serenade for strings ..................... Tchaikovsky {/TABLE} THE OPENING concert of the Belfast Festival was given at the Whitla Hall last night by the Belgian orchestra I Fiamminghi under its founding conductor, Rudolf Werthen. For this concert, the group was playing at a strength of 17 strings, in other words, just one more than the current line up of the Irish Chamber Orchestra, the extra instrument being a second double bass.
The programme divided neatly into 20th and 19th century halves, with the more recent works placed at the start of the evening. Opening with music as concentrated, demanding and exposed as Webern's Op. 5. was a dangerous gesture which didn't quite pay off. Not everything in the orchestra's playing here sounded technically well adjusted, and the conductor seemed inclined towards a style that sought to dilute the music's intense expressionism by imposing on it the trappings of more everyday musical conventions.
Style proved to be the stumbling block in much of the evening's music making, as the technique solidified impressively in the second half. The Tchaikovsky Serenade seemed to polarise into passages that were on the one hand too hard driven and over stressed, or, on the other, so concerned with soft grained surface textures that the melodic material got lost in the texturing process.
Like the Tchaikovsky, Grieg's Holberg Suite, too, was oddly imbalanced in spite of the players' undeniable technical polish, the expressive character of the music making was uncomfortably brittle.
It was a nice idea to present the three works by Gorecki and Part as the core of the first half, charting stages of emergence and maturity in what has been dubbed "holy minimalism". The two works by Part found the upper strings too thinly stretched, but Gorecki's Three Pieces in Old Style, with their early (1963) intimations of the music that was to come, were persuasively done.
Even better was the playing of Belgian composer Dirk Brosse's For France and strings, written for, the group's cellist, France Springuel. This sounded like schmaltzy, unreconstructed pastiche of the harmonic and melodic certainties of a bygone age. The group played it for all it was worth. And more.
