The Music in Great Irish Houses Festival celebrated its 30th anniversary with a return after a four-year gap to a renovated but not quite ready Castletown House for its opening concert on Thursday. Renovated and not quite ready might indeed be applied to the playing of Christ Church Baroque too, whose music-making fell into three distinct categories.
In concertos from the Opp 6 of Handel and Corelli, the achievements of the playing suggested that the group's priorities were wrong. Lapses of ensemble and intonation were frequent, the angular shaping of lines was correct in direction only, not in proportion, and the sense of larger (even phrase-long) spans was extremely poor.
The British trumpeter Crispian Steele-Perkins did a turn in the middle of each half of the programme, playing the music with an infectious enthusiasm. He combined education, entertainment and music-making in a most rewarding way.
Then the final work of the evening, Bach's Third Brandenburg Concerto lifted the whole evening onto a new level of musical vitality.
