Requiem - Verdi
As long ago as 1985, the Irish committee for European Music Year aired major proposals for cross-Border co-operation in musical performance. The focus was Mahler's Eighth Symphony, since heard in Dublin in a highly unsatisfactory, electronically amplified account, and next year to be heard au naturel in Belfast's Waterfront Hall, but with the extra choral voices imported from Scotland.
Last year saw a major upsurge in large-scale cross-Border activity. Mozart's Requiem toured with an all-Ireland chorus to mark the bicentenary of the 1798 Rebellion (the venture was the subject of a documentary for BBC television), and Haydn's Creation was given at the Waterfront Hall in Belfast, in a performance involving choirs from both sides of the Border.
The body behind this latter undertaking, Cross Border Music Projects, this year chose to celebrate the 125th anniversary of the Verdi Requiem with performances in Belfast (on May 1st) and Dublin - on Saturday, the 125th anniversary to the day.
In Dublin, the combined choirs and Belfast's leading amateur orchestra, the Studio Symphony Orchestra (stiffened with a smattering of Dublin professionals), were conducted by the Culwick Choral Society's Colin Block.
Appropriately enough, the sheer mass of the choir provided one of the greatest pleasures of the evening. Sopranos and altos filled the balcony choir stalls, tenors and basses overflowed on to the main stage, providing, from my downstairs seat, a weight and resonance in the lower voices that I haven't heard achieved in the NCH before. And it was good that the conductor chose so often to exploit the sort of massive murmur which only such a large body of voices can produce.
The orchestral playing, the best you are likely to hear from a large amateur orchestra on this island, was at times over-stretched by Verdi's demands, unfortunately not always in places where it might have been masked by the choirs in full flight or the excitement of the moment. The overall musical effect, then, was rather patchy, causing Verdi to sound unexpectedly long-winded.
The team of soloists - soprano Orla Boylan, contralto Deirdre Cooling-Nolan, tenor David Fieldsend and bass Frank O'Brien - sang firmly and with strong projection, Boylan and Fieldsend finding a richer expressive depth than either of their colleagues.
