Irish Chamber Choir: The Eternal Feminine (Concert Review - The Irish Times, 2007)

Twentieth-century music may have a bad reputation, but a few extra chairs had to be put out at the National Gallery on Thursday for the latest, 20th- and 21st-century programme in the National Chamber Choir's Eternal Feminine series.

Some members of the audience were moved to give a standing ovation at the end of Messiaen's Cinq Rechants .

Cinq Rechants is actually the least well-known of Messiaen's Tristan and Isolde-inspired trilogy of the 1940s, which also includes the song-cycle Harawi and the Turangalîla-Symphonie.

Thursday's performance used all 17 voices of the National Chamber Choir rather than the composer's specified 12 soloists. This allowed for moments of extra richness and the almost ecstatic incantations of the female solos in this intense piece were strongly taken.

Arvo Pärt's Bogoróditse Dyévo, John Tavener's Mother of God, here I stand (from his night-long The Veil of the Temple) and the three pieces by US composer Eric Whitacre were all much softer in surface. The Pärt was short and sounded both simple and full. The Tavener was calm, with gentle brushes of dissonance, but a bit bland. The pieces by Whitacre were full of sweet, resonant commonplaces.

Polish composer Pawel Lukaszewski's Ave Maria (using just those two words as its text) began in a mode that sounded like the triadic harmony equivalent of those explorations of sonority that were once a feature of the Polish avant-garde. The piece made direct obeisance to that avant-garde before returning to its opening mode.

Poulenc's Salve Regina, written in 1941, brought out the very best in the choir. Guest conductor Stephen Layton directed a performance of secure stylishness that handled the music's occasional harmonic surprises with expert timing.

It may have been the oldest piece in the programme, but in many ways it also sounded the freshest.

Michael Dervan