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Music, both profound and sweet, from the young and the seasoned

February 16, 2011

By Staff Reporter

By Joseph Hurley

THE ROYAL IRISH ACADEMY OF MUSIC CHAMBER ORCHESTRA WITH PIANO SOLOIST JOHN O’CONOR. At the Merkin Concert Hall, NYC. Nov. 23. WHAT MAKES IT GREAT? WITH PIANIST JOHN O’CONOR AND ROBERT KAPILOW. At the Walter Reade Theater, Lincoln Center, NYC. Nov. 12.

In these painful days, it is difficult to imagine anything more inspiring than the 16 young Irish musicians, all of them between 17 and 22 and members of the Royal Irish Academy of Music Chamber Orchestra, as they made their American debut recently at Merkin Concert Hall.

The New York appearance, part of a tour that included engagements in Washington, D.C., Boston, and Stamford, Conn., where the group appeared, with pianist John O’Conor, under the sponsorship of the Wild Geese, the cultural and charitable organization that had helped him launch his international career.

All of the concerts began with “The Coulin (An Chuilfhionn,”) a solemn air played by violinist Marie-Louise Bowe and dedicated to the victims of the Sept. 11 terror attacks.

And every evening, pianist O’Conor, the director of the Academy of Music, joined the orchestra for a performance of Mozart’s Concerto for Piano and Orchestra in E-flat Major, K449.

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Following “The Coulin,” the chamber orchestra performed Mozart’s Divertimento in D-major, K136, playing with the kind of authority and technical assurance normally found in more mature musicians working with well-seasoned musical organizations.

If the Royal Irish Academy of Music performers’ inexperience was evident anywhere, it was probably in the work they played immediately before their collaboration with O’Conor, namely the celebrated and perhaps too familiar Adagio for Strings, Op. 11, by the late Samuel Barber, moments of which seemed slightly ragged and possibly underrehearsed.

The final pre-intermission work was the Mozart Concerto for Piano and Orchestra, during which O’Conor’s attention gravitated so naturally and so strongly to the young musicians that he played with his back turned to the audience.

Following the break, the Dubliners returned with three elegant pieces seldom heard in New York, all of them the work of Irish composers and arrangers, starting with Arthur Duff’s Irish Suite for Strings, composed in 1940, and continuing with John Kinsella’s Nocturne, and Bill Thorp’s “Suite: Irish Sherry,” a joyous arrangement of traditional Irish tunes.

Fine as they were before the intermission, the musicians seemed especially comfortable with the Irish music, which they rendered with seemingly inexhaustible brio and feeling. An almost palpable sense of joy seemed to flood the hall during this portion of the performance.

One night before the chamber orchestra’s Merkin Hall debut, pianist O’Conor had taken part in one of Lincoln Center’s most successful ongoing music series, “What Makes It Great?” with host Robert Kapilow, conductor and composer whose book “What Makes It So Great?” led to the concert hall version, now in its fifth season at the Walter Reade Theater.

The work played by O’Conor and dissected by Kapilow was Beethoven’s Sonata No. 23 in F-Minor, Op. 57, familiarly known as the “Appassionata.” O’Conor played with his unique blend of stunning power and almost lacelike delicacy. At times, it seemed that his hands were separate entities, doing their work on their own as their owner sat quietly on the piano bench, looking on in quiet amazement.

— Joseph Hurley

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