Sonata in A K331 - Mozart 32

Variations in C minor - Beethoven

Prelude in C sharp minor Op 45 - Chopin

Fantaisie impromptu - Chopin

Le Tombeau - Daniel Bortz

Sonata in A minor D845 - Schubert

The Swedish pianist Hans Palsson, who played at the National Concert Hall last night in a concert presented by the Gerard Manley Hopkins Society in association with the James Joyce Centre, is a tonally well-equipped performer. The melodic highlighting at the opening of the Mozart sonata, the periodic picking out of lines from the middle and bottom of the texture, were carried out with consummate ease, however inappropriate the procedures may have been to the passages they were applied to.

Palsson has no lack of ideas, from mid-movement cadences, semaphored with exaggerated rallentandos, to little delays heightening the effect of accents, to major manipulations of tempo that challenge the music's ability to stay in focus in the face of their extremes.

Unfortunately, neither the abundance of the ideas nor the resourcefulness of their implementation were backed up to any great extent by the quality of the ideas themselves. In the first half, Beethoven's C minor Variations withstood the busy posturing much better than either Mozart or Chopin.

The opening of Schubert's A minor Sonata, D845, had a directness and simplicity that offered a temporary oasis without intrusive clutter, but, sadly, this more effective style was quickly abandoned.

The Tombeau movement from the four-year-old Piano Sonata by Palsson's fellow-countryman, Daniel Bortz (born 1943), juxtaposed dissonant chordal tolling with passages featuring updated Alberti basses. Here, at last, the style of the music and the manner of delivery seemed absolutely at one.