Rosamunde Overture - Schubert
Rhapsody under a high sky - A.J. Potter
Flute Concerto in G - Mozart
Irish Symphony - Sullivan
It's good to see the RTE Concert Orchestra's August teatime concerts breaking out of the light music mould. It seems a pity, then, that the publicity advertised a flute concerto by Mercadante when the work actually played was Mozart's Flute Concerto in G. Based on the number of available recordings, the two Mozart concertos are more than 10 times as popular as the two by Mercadante (and the more popular of the two by Mercadante is more than twice as popular as Sullivan's Irish Symphony).
The Irish is Sullivan's only symphony, written on a visit to Belfast when the composer was 21. The premiere was hailed by The Times ("the best musical work . . . for a long time produced by any English composer"), but more sober assessment followed in other publications within a few years. It's a pleasant curiosity, of interest by virtue of its composer's age and later achievements, and as a symphony from a country where few were produced in the middle of the 19th century. Proinnsias O Duinn handled it with obvious affection, but without winning from his orchestra the polished contours he achieved in A.J. Potter's mid-20th-century pastoral Rhapsody under a high sky.
Directness was the order of the day in Schubert's Rosa munde Overture and the Mozart Flute Concerto. Emer McDonough, now in her mid-twenties, was recently appointed principal flautist of the Hong Kong Philharmonic. Her Mozart showed an impressive reliability of delivery and consistency of tone throughout the range. A degree more flexion and relaxation would have been needed to show at its best this music for an instrument Mozart didn't like.
