Last Friday marked the first appearance of a new commission on the concert programme of the NSO’s 2024/25 season with the Irish premiere of Stephen McNeff’s song cycle The Celestial Stranger, a co-commission with the BBC National Orchestra of Wales who premiered the work in May of last year. The work marked a continuation of a collaboration with Irish tenor and proud Kerryman Gavan Ring for whom McNeff previously wrote the song cycle Ballads of a Bogman based on the poetry of Ring’s fellow Cahirsiveenian, the late Sigerson Clifford. McNeff may be a name new to Irish audiences, but the Belfast-born Irish composer has carved out a successful career for himself in the UK with several operas and theatre works under his belt.

The Celestial Stranger was inspired by the discovery of a treatise entitled The Kingdom of God by the 17th-century Christian mystic Thomas Traherne in Lambeth Library in 1997. In a particularly rapturous passage entitled The Celestial Stranger, Traherne imagined alien beings visiting earth for the first time and being enchanted by its natural beauty. 

McNeff expanded this idea into five movements, adding poems by Walt Whitman, Dylan Thomas and Lili’uokalani to two texts by Traherne. The structure thus formed a clear narrative arc from the sense of wonderment and joy in Traherne’s writing to the darker, more dystopian images present in Whitman’s ‘As the Time Draws Nigh’ and Thomas’‘The Hand that Signed the Paper’, both of which, in their respective ways, recount the destructive consequences of rationalisation and the human thirst for power. Lili’uokalani’s ‘Farewell to Thee’ concluded the cycle as the wanderer protagonist bade farewell with an ‘understanding of the imperfections of the world’.

Bright orchestral palette
Musically, McNeff beautifully matched the evocative imagery of the poems with an orchestral palette that managed to pack in a wealth of timbral and textural variety. The piece was led by strong, well-shaped vocal lines given to the tenor which freed the orchestra from the role of being a mere accompaniment and provided great scope to illustrate the prevailing mood suggested by the text. A generally bright orchestral palette of sonorous brass, radiant strings and shimmering percussion characterised the opening setting of ‘The Celestial Stranger’ leading to more exuberantly playful textures explored in ‘On Leaping Over the Moon’, the second Traherne text.

The mood took a sharp turn at the beginning of the Whitman setting when the initially pastoral opening gave way to martial rhythms on the line ‘I see men marching and countermarching by swift millions’ and the sense of foreboding reached its climax in the bleak Thomas setting. The final setting of Lili’uokalani’s ‘Farewell to Thee’ was the calmest of the songs though the warmth of the string writing, and the lyricism of the vocal line was tempered by lingering brass dissonances in the final chord. The cycle was a powerful demonstration of inventive orchestration and Ring delivered an immense performance, launching himself fully into the piece.

Lina González-Granados (Photo: Joanne Taaffe/NSO)

The performance greatly benefited from the clarity and attention to detail of Columbian conductor Lina González-Granados, something that also came through in the NSO’s performance of the other items on the programme: Debussy’s Prélude à l’après-midi d’une faune, which opened the concert, and Rachmaninov’s second symphony.

Although Debussy’s prelude was taken at a very slow tempo and could be criticised for being too restrained, even dry, the sense of balance between the competing timbres and the overall clarity of the sound made for a compelling listen. The fear that González-Granados might take a similarly measured approach with the Rachmaninov in the second half was soon allayed as the NSO delivered one of those rare performances were high-energy was matched with precision and tautness.

It should be pointed out that the NSO know both Debussy’s prelude and Rachmaninov’s symphony like the back of their hand as both pieces are standard repertoire staples that appear regularly on their programme. Still though, it is not often that one hears them played with quite such electric conviction and I personally would not at all mind seeing González-Granados back on the NSO podium sometime in the near future.  

For the National Symphony Orchestra’s upcoming concerts, visit www.nch.ie.

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Gavan Ring, Stephen McNeff and Lina González-Granados (Photo: Joanne Taaffe/NSO)