The Bord Gais Cork International Choral Festival is operating this year without the benefit of its regular venue, City Hall, which is unavailable due to renovation work. The competitions are largely being relocated to the Cork Opera House, and the opening concert found itself for the first time in the Cathedral of St Mary and St Anne (North Cathedral).
The new venue was not the only innovation. The choir employed was the RTE Chorale, a once-off group on the lines of the RTE Chorus, a medium-sized professional chorus brought together for special projects. The RTE Chorus was killed off in the cutbacks of 1990, "reinstated" by the RTE Authority in 1993, but has been unheard of since.
Listening to the confidence and freedom of the RTE Chorale at the consistently demanding speeds set by Roy Goodman, one can only lament the disappearance from Irish musical life of this type of choir (one of the RTE Chorus's abandoned projects was Bach's St Matthew Passion under Ton Koopman).
Although the choir's responsiveness was a pleasure in itself, it could not ameliorate some of the less healthy side-effects of Goodman's haste.
With so much of the music sounding too fast, both slow movements and quicker ones, the feeling of contrast over large spans was seriously diminished.
And with a generously resonant acoustic, dynamics needed to be steered towards the quieter end of the spectrum for a reasonable amount of clarity to be retained.
Of the instrumental items on the programme, Bach's Brandenburg Concerto No 3 sounded least well, driven and blurred.
The mock-baroque of the Albinoni/Giazzotto Adagio came across well, but it was after the interval, in the sixth concerto of Handel's Op. 6 that the expressive character of the playing became most flexible in matching the needs of the music.
Similarly, with the choral items, the closing Magnificat by Bach made an altogether stronger impression than the earlier Te Deum by Charpentier.
The two soprano soloists, Judith Mok and Lynda Lee, were admittedly uneven. But the bass, Philip O'Reilly, was in fine stentorian form, tenor John Elwes proved an acute balancer of the demands of declamation and musical line, and his partnership with counter tenor, Lawrence Zazzo, had an air of magic about it.
