Divertimento in F K138 - Mozart
Piano Concerto in C K415 - Mozart
Bliain le Baisteach - Mikael
Fernstrom/Sean Taylor, Romance in C Op 42 - Sibelius
Divertimento for strings - Bartok
It's easy to see why Mikael Fernstrom and Sean Taylor's project to use a computer to turn Irish rainfall data into a piece of music based on traditional Irish tunes has caused such a stir.
Composers, of course, have been doing similar things using only human computing power for years, cyphering words and names into their works. The novelty of the Fernstrom/Taylor approach aisteach is that they chose to dispense with the composer: Taylor is an artist and Fernstrom, course leader of the Master's Programme in Interactive Media at the University of Limerick, has long been approaching music "as a scientist, suppressing the artist and composer within", as he puts it.
The basic project was practical and the material it produced was viable. But there's something about the energetically dancing outcome as a composition - the actual final forming, or, perhaps, deforming - that seems to sell the venture short.
The Irish Chamber Orchestra has already recorded the work for CD. On Thursday, accompanied by meteorological video images of the swirl of clouds off the Atlantic, the orchestra gave the concert premiere with typically focused commitment.
It was a one-off performance, not being repeated on the orchestra's current tour with the young Russian pianist, Alexei Nabioulin, winner of the AXA Dublin International Piano Competition last May. In a strings-accompanied performance of Mozart's Piano Concerto in C, K415, he played with precisely weighted delicacy, suggesting the style of Mozart-playing that's often characterised as "Dresden china", but without lapsing into its potential shallowness.
Under the leadership of Fionnuala Hunt, the 19-member ICO played the early Mozart divertimento with nimble elegance, dug with greater ardency into the Sibelius Romance, and gave a reading of Bartok's 1939 Divertimento which wasn't always fully successful in painting the broader strokes but was consistently strong in virtuosically delivered detail.
