{TABLE} Flamboys .................. Gerald Barry Piano Concerto No 4 ....... Beethoven Mother Goose Suite ........ Ravel Firebird Suite ............ Stravinsky {/TABLE} THE premiere of Gerald Barry's Flamboys was given under difficult circumstances in 1992, as part of an amplified concert at The Point. The piece was given its second Dublin hearing at the National Concert Hall last night, as part of the programme that the National Symphony Orchestra and its principal conductor, Kasper de Roo, are taking on tour to Edinburgh, Glasgow and London.
The NCH performance of this sequence of chorales, waltzes and hornpipes (the composer's description) quite outshone the first. Things gelled from the composer's opening gambit, a sort of dialogue between bassoon and trumpet, each of them given recurring notes (high for the bassoon, low for the trumpet) which are awkwardly out of reach for the players.
De Roo directed a performance that was straight and sharp. The giddy, skitterish humour was as well caught as the moments of sustained orchestral onslaught - the score includes directions like "Hammer" (to the pianist) and, "Screaming".
The rest of the concert offered plainer fare, though that must have as much to do with the music making as the music, for there is nothing plain about Beethoven's Fourth Piano Concerto, Ravel's Mother Goose Suite or Stravinsky's Firebird Suite.
Barry Douglas was the soloist in the Beethoven, offering playing that was consistently collected and poised. But, after the unexpected chill of the long orchestral exposition in this performance, his finely regulated pianism didn't really manage to strike the necessary note of warmth. In this context, his choice of the second of Beethoven's first movement cadenzas sounded more stylistically disruptive than musically adventurous, and his propensity to experiment with the old fashioned practice of playing the left hand before the right seemed ill advised.
The two suites of the second half are each in their own way orchestral showpieces. De Roo presented them in penny plain format, with little of the magical fantasy that's to be found in the Ravel (the best movement here was the closing Fairy Garden) and not much of the sensuality of colour and texture of the Firebird. It was hard not to think of what the orchestral wizardry of principal guest conductor Alexander Anissimov might not have achieved in these pieces, and it is to be hoped that the adrenalin of touring will enliven the orchestra's playing over the coming days.
