The Irish Times 21st June 1982
Great Irish Houses Festival ends
Serenade for Strings in E min. op 20 – Elgar
Music for Castletown – Wilson
Cello Concerto No 4 in D, H.Vllb/4 Haydn
Symphony No. I in E flat, K 16 Mozart
THIS year’s Festival in Great Irish Houses came to an end on Saturday night at Castletown with a concert by the New Irish Chamber Orchestra conducted by Bryden Thomson.
An elegant performance of the Elgar serenade depends upon carefully-thought-out attention to the composer’s immensely detailed markings – and he was, after all, a string player. This performance did not rise to what it might have been, just because the relativities of the phrasing were not realised.
James Wilson’s new piece was commissioned from the festival thanks to the Arts Council’s commissioning scheme. Not withstanding the use towards the end of “Thugamar fein an samhradh linn,” the work left me with an austere and perhaps overintellectual impression, but I must stress that that was after only a single hearing.
Mozart’s youthful, if already well-made, first symphony seemed too slight a work with which to bring a festival to a triumphant conclusion, even though Mr Thomson brought out a number of its individual felicities.
It would have been better to have switched the last two works around, as it turned out, because Julian Lloyd Webber’s performance of this unfamiliar Haydn concerto was of the utmost excitement.
It is only recently that contemporary copies of it have turned up, the 1894 edition being too heavily edited. It is argued whether it is by Haydn himself or by G. B. Costanzi. On Saturday, I found myself enjoying it much more than I have Haydn’s undoubted cello concertos, but I am quite willing to put this down to a performance of enormous conviction, excitement and outpouring communication by Mr Lloyd Webber, in which he caught up his colleagues into the sort of experience that would have made a great end to any festival.
By Charles Acton
