{TABLE} Te Deum ......................... Haydn Piano Concerto No 5 (Emperor) ... Beethoven Heiligmesse ..................... Haydn {/TABLE} THE closing concert of Kilikenny Arts Week was given at St Canice's Cathedral last night by the Irish Youth Choir and the RTE Concert Orchestra under Geoffrey Spratt.
The choir performed in two of Haydn's late choral works, the Te Deum written for the Empress Marie Therese and the Missa Sancti Bernardi von Offida.
The Mass is named after the 17th century Capuchin monk Bernard of Offida who was beatified in 1795; this work is now generally known by a shorter name, Heiligmesse, after the title of an old church song which Haydn carefully worked into the Sanctus.
The Te Deum finds Haydn in an outgoing C major mode which, in spite of the composer's mid journey interpolation of a 10 bar Adagio, seems to be difficult for performers to sustain even over the short span of the piece.
Last night's performance was more persuasive in the brief slow section than in the buoyant outer ones.
The soloist in Beethoven's Emperor Concerto, the Cork resident pianist Brian MacNamara, set out to give a big boned account.
He kept rather too insistently to a single mode, with little attention paid to the composer's many indications at the softer end of the dynamic scale; even the start of the Adagio suffered in this respect.
And the insistence (which was not always supported with sufficient knuckle, in the semiquaver triplets of the opening movement, for instance) brought with it a tone of clinicality which was alien to the music.
From the very opening of the Mass in the second hall, it was hard to resist the feeling that here was the piece the concert had been created around, that the first two works were somehow incidental to this, the main offering.
The Irish Youth Choir offered that easy, openness of tone which only young voices can supply, and the confident scaling of the heights by the sopranos was a particular pleasure.
Conductor Geoffrey Spratt (who had been guilty of some rather rough joins in the Beethoven) here achieved a real sense of internal illumination, setting choir and orchestra (on far better form than in Thursday's concert) against each other in complementary rather than competitive fashion.
The four soloists Helen Hassett (soprano), Bridget Knowles (contralto), Alan Leech (tenor), and Gordon Garde (bass) proved a quartet without the slightest whiff of the operatic stage in their vocal character.
The Haydn Masses I have heard in concert have rarely been graced with such stylish singing, and the deeply moving purity of Bridget Knowles's "Et incarnatus" (Haydn at his most inspired) marks her out as a singer we should be hearing a lot more of.
