Impromptus D899 ..................... Schubert
Moments musicaux, Op 16 ............. Rachmaninov
Capriccio in G minor, Op116 No 4 .... Brahms
Intermezzo in E, Op 116 No 4 ........ Brahms
Capriccio in D minor, Op116 No 17 ... Brahms
Fantasy in C, Op 17 ................. Schumann
THE penultimate concert in the AIB Music Festival in Great Irish Houses was given at Carton on Saturday by Barry Douglas. Ireland's most successful pianist is not new to this small venue and the uncompromising nature of his playing in such a restricted space is already well known.
On Saturday he was in pianistically magisterial form, the playing stamped with a fineness of controlled detailing which is in the gift of very few performers.
Musically, the evening was rather more variable, if always interesting. In the Schubert Impromptus there was an analytical clarity which seemed to impose an unwonted severity:
on the music, and in the two fast pieces from Brahms's Op. 116 (Nos 3 and 7) he seemed to be striving for a directness of yield which is to be found more readily in Rachmaninov's piano writing than in that of Brahms.
Some of the mystery may have been lacking in the outer movements of Schumann's great Fantasy in C, but the stride of the central march was firm and the treacherous leaps of its coda were commandingly dealt with. Even more impressive was the fearlessness in the face of Rachmaninov's whirlwind writing in his Op. 16 Moments musieaux, where the quieter pieces, too, had an idiomatically easeful glow that was missing from the Schubert. Neither the magically cushioned, soft striding bass octaves in the middle of the third piece (in B minor) nor the high tension clamour of the sixth (in C major) will easily be forgotten.
Douglas rounded off the evening with two encores, a dazzling account of Liszt's florid Rigoletto Paraphrase and a thoroughly astonishing account of Stravinsky's Tango, which contrived to scale the heights of virtuosic display while remaining thoroughly faithful to the dry wit of the composer's conception.
