The centrepiece of this winter’s biannual Tradition Now weekend in the National Concert Hall was Lisa O’Neill’s collaboration with the National Symphony Orchestra under Gabriella Teychenné. At least, it was the most elaborate concert. But in the event, it was also the most baffling.

O’Neill and the NSO played a selection of songs from her back catalogue, from the quirky ‘Apiana’ from her 2013 record Same Cloth or Not, to the more sombre ‘Old Note’ from her most recent album, All of This is Chance (2023), as well as a new song. This was all set to new arrangements by Terry Edwards, who has worked as a musician on the English scene for several decades. 

O’Neill herself was on form: openly daunted to be surrounded by so many musicians, she was also buoyed by them. She gave a forceful, authentic performance interspersed by her characteristic disarming banter. But I once saw her with just an acoustic guitar in Whelan’s and was equally impressed. What did the orchestra add? After all, her music is already orchestrated: intelligent and varied arrangements feature all throughout her albums, and they have occasionally even featured string orchestras and other larger ensembles. Never a symphony orchestra, to be sure, but is that not as it should be? I would not have thought that O’Neill’s intimate and earthy songs, with their love for little things closely observed (‘Violet Gibson’, for example), would be complemented by the pomp and grandeur of an orchestra.

Connections
It is true there’s a co-existing tendency in her work to anagogically read things for their deep meaning: O’Neill describes Gibson with caring detail but also connects her life to contemporary politics and reflections on human nature. Perhaps a symphony orchestra is not out of keeping with this sensibility. And some clues in the programme led me to wonder if O’Neill’s songs had been woven into some larger structure. When the concert opened with the NSO playing John Williams’ ‘Flying Theme’ to E.T., I was confused enough to be willing to see where this was all going.

Nowhere much, it turns out. The gestures towards a ‘Symphony for the Moons’ (the title of the concert) didn’t amount to anything substantial; O’Neill explained the Williams as the first time she had ever heard a symphony orchestra, but this was the end of the impact of that piece on the concert.

If the purpose of this concert wasn’t to weave some sort of new narrative from O’Neill’s songs, then neither was it because of some great musical synergy between O’Neill and Edwards. There was really only one song, ‘Birdy from Another Realm’, where Edwards’ orchestration added something significant to the music: dynamic swells on the strings added space and depth to the music, and it ended with light, fluttering trills on the woodwind. You couldn’t do this with just a guitar, and the more atmospheric, muted orchestration on the album version of this song did not have Edwards’ ambition. There were some nice passing moments elsewhere. For example, using a celesta in ‘Apiana’ instead of the piano that was beside it on the stage did a good job of capturing how the piano narrating that song was not any old piano but something individual, distinctive, with its own personality. 

But otherwise, the orchestration sounded like a solution in search of a problem. It was competent and intricately written, but not responsive to the particulars of the music – the lullaby ‘Goodnight World’, for example, was given a dramatic rendering that was in no danger of putting any baby to sleep. And the orchestration only really varied along one axis: ‘epicness’, perhaps. It was also conservative in the extreme, often sounding like the warmed-over John Williams that opened the concert. Moreover, it was at odds with O’Neill’s complex vocal timbre: the neutral timbres of the instruments in this sort of Hollywood film score music needs the neutral vocal tones of a trained voice; O’Neill, who doesn’t sound like anyone else, needs accompaniment that doesn’t sound like anything else. (Consider Joanna Newsom’s equally singular voice, and how well Van Dyke Parks’ orchestration on Ys complements it.)

Occasionally the orchestration badly detracted from the music. ‘Black Sheep’ was stripped of the humour and psychedelic strangeness it has on Pothole in the Sky, and what is even more frustrating, that version features a string orchestra, the thoughtful use of which could have served as a model. Failures like this were rare enough, though. For the most part the orchestra was just inoffensive and forgettable, not quite working, underneath O’Neill’s voice. Her voice was powerful enough to carry the concert, but what a lead weight it was burdened with.

For upcoming concerts, visit https://lisaoneill.ie.

–

Subscribe to our newsletter.