Songs and Dances of Death - Mussorgsky

Sonata for two clarinets - Poulenc

Septet - Stravinsky

Into Darkness - Kevin Volans

Le bal masque - Poulenc

The works of Poulenc have been memorably likened by Martin Cooper to "the nests of a musical jackdaw". A more contemporary image might be an outlandish dresser who manages to bring off farfetched combinations simply by having had the imaginative daring to combine their particular choice of apparently incompatible garments in the first place.

The pleasures of Reamonn Keary's Poulenc Panorama concerts, given with players from the NSO, have been to do with hearing the sort of music that's not easily accommodated in a city without an active largish chamber ensemble, something like, say, London's Nash Ensemble, or the Esbjerg Ensemble from Denmark. The drawback has been that, as a musical jackdaw, Keary has assembled programmes without the sharply-illuminating contrasts of his chosen subject, sometimes even managing to overshadow Poulenc.

This is exactly what happened in the final instalment of his series on Tuesday night, when the magisterial conviction of bass Conor Biggs in Mussorgsky's Songs and Dan ces of Death left resonances which made Poulenc sound slight, if oh-so-clever. In the Mussorgsky, Biggs showed how much he has grown in stature as a performer of song in recent years. He's adjusted his expressive range to his vocal resources, and quite removed an earlier sense of strain, of striving for more volume than his voice could yield.

Placing the instruments between singer and audience in the surrealistic settings of the closing Bal masque was an unkind gesture, leading to imbalances which the conductor, Fergus O'Carroll, seemed unwilling to resolve.

The multi-layered compositional virtuosity of Stravinsky's Septet was delivered with a commitment which didn't quite uncover its secrets (what performance ever does?). The mostly subdued patterns of Kevin Volans's Into Darkness of 1987 (included to commemorate the composer's imminent 50th birthday) managed to sound almost more restrained in colour than his most famous piece, White Man Sleeps of a year earlier, in spite of the disparity of resources (piano, clarinet, trumpet, violin, cello, marimba and vibraphone, as against string quartet).

Poulenc's youthfully cheeky Sonata for two clarinets was done with verve by John Finucane and Paul Roe.