{TABLE} Leonora No 3 Overture ............ Beethoven Symphony No 6 .................... John Kinsella Emperor Concerto ................. Beethoven {/TABLE} SINCE the mid 1980s, when he completed his Symphony No. 1, symphonies appear to have been the main preoccupation of the composer John Kinsella. The latest to receive a public airing is No. 6, a 30 minute single movement work, which was premiered by the National Symphony Orchestra under Proinnsias O Duinn last night.
The piece seems to have a festive mood - perhaps to do with the composer's dedication of the work to seven "special friends with whom I have shared a common love for music for many years - and it calls for seven horns, three of them spaced around the auditorium. There's also, frequently, an air of pastoralism, and sometimes, too, of nostalgia.
The music struck me as denser of material and tighter of argument than any of its predecessors, an impression enhanced by cogent and compelling playing of the NSO under Proinnsias O Duinn.
The concert opened with another piece employing offstage brass, Beethoven's Leonora No. 3 Overture, which, after a dangerously slow introduction, the conductor delivered with finely judged tautness.
The same rewardingly clear focus and air of interpretative centrality was to be found in the orchestral contribution to the Emperor Piano Concerto. The soloist here was the winner of London's 1994 World Piano Competition, Eugene Mursky, who was born in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, in 1975 and is currently training in Germany. His playing was direct of manner, bright of tone and carried through with a determined clarity of purpose that was made evident from the opening flourishes.
