Billed as From Baroque to the Big Screen, the inaugural concert for Louth Chamber Orchestra certainly had a broad variety of styles on the menu. A number of baroque works, some traditional Irish tunes and a selection of pieces from film scores with vocal accompaniment. The ensemble grew out of young musicians from the Music Generation programme and is directed by Davide Forti and Francesca De Nardi who perform as soloists and have their own group called Sonas Duo.

The concert in the recital room of Dundalk Institute of Technology opened with the Rondo from Henry Purcell’s 1695 incidental music to the play Abdelazar. A short and quite impressive introduction to the baroque pieces by the young musicians. This was followed by a selection from the somewhat intriguing ‘Battalia’ by Heinrich Biber, a prolific Bohemian composer who wasn’t adverse to using unconventional techniques and dissonance in his compositions. The piece from 1673 is a sonata depicting the sound of battle which engages some rather interesting performance techniques like col legno where the strings are tapped with the wood of the bow and the placing of paper over the double bass strings to create a ‘snare drum’ effect. This techniques along with sharp pizzicato string plucking were all intended to create the percussive and martial impression of battle. 

Finally we had what for me was the highlight of the baroque pieces. A concerto grosso by Francesco Geminiani. Like Biber he was a very accomplished virtuoso violinist writing a book called ‘The Art of Playing on the Violin’. Geminiani was born in Lucca in 1687 and spent a lot of his time in London, occasionally visiting Dublin where he performed & taught music and eventually died there in 1762. The concerto is a set of variations on a sonata by his teacher Arcangelo Corelli who had a significant influence on him. The concerto upscales one of Corelli’s original sonata for violin and continuo filling out the harmony to a fuller and larger sound and scope. This piece really showed the preparation and abilities of the young string players with the call and answer passages from the full ensemble to soloists Francesca De Nardi & Emily Moran on violin, Riccardo Forti on viola and Davide Forti on cello beautifully performed.

Special guests Adele Commins, Daithi Kearney and Noreen McManus performed a selection of traditional pieces both with full ensemble backing and with Dearbhla Marron and Blaithin Hand on violin which brought a nice lively touch of variety and got feet tapping. The concert continued with a selection of pieces from the popular Pirates of the Caribbean soundtrack and ended with selections from The Prince of Egypt Suite which featured singers Lorianne O’Rourke and Seara Lennon.

This impressive group of young musicians and singers turned out in concert black made for a very enjoyable inaugural concert. It is wonderful to see an orchestra like this getting of the ground and I certainly wish then the best and hope to hear a lot more from them in the future.