Variations on Ah! Vous, Dirai-je Maman - Mozart

Variations, Opus 27 - Webern

Impromptus D899 - Schubert

Six Little Pieces, Opus 19 - Schoenberg

Sonata - Berg

Moonlight Sonata - Beethoven

John O'Conor's programme at the National Concert Hall on Sunday, part of the NCH/Irish Times Celebrity Concert Series, celebrated the music of Vienna.

The Austrian capital is, of course, the city where, nearly 30 years ago, this pianist first made his international mark by taking the top prize at the Beethoven Competition of 1973. And Beethoven, naturally enough, featured in Sunday's collection of evergreens, which represented the triumvirate at the heart of the Second Viennese School as well as the Viennese classical masters.

The programme offered three pairs of works, sets of variations by Mozart (on the tune best known in this part of the world as Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star) and Webern, both of which test performers' taste with their apparently conflicting demands of formality and expressivity.

Then followed two sets of independent pieces on either side of the interval, the first of Schubert's free-flowing sets of Impromptus and Schoenberg's aphoristic, pre12-tone Opus 19. Finally, to round up this evening of work by men under 40, two sonatas, the utterly inimitable Moonlight by Beethoven, whose output even by the age of 31 would surely have gained him a prominent place in the history of music, and Berg's expressionist Opus 1, written at the age of 23 under the guidance of Schoenberg.

O'Conor was in fluent, well-mannered form, restrained and rounded of tone, and he lost his savoir- faire only in some of the heated climaxes of the Berg. The effect in general was of patrician mastery, although in both the fine detailing of line and the control of voicing O'Conor still allows himself minute disruptions of musical flow which seem more a matter of technical expediency than musical necessity. That said, this was an agreeable presentation of a well-chosen sequence of music which interestingly and usefully diverged from the norms of chronological programming.