{TABLE} Prelude and Fugue in C minor BWV871 ................ Bach Violin Sonata in A minor Op 23 ..................... Beethoven Waterscape ......................................... Marian Ingoldsby Caprice Viennois ................................... Kreisler Piano Sonata in C Op 2 No 3 ........................ Beethoven Poeme .............................................. Chausson {/TABLE} BRIONA Cahill is a young violinist with a pronounced streak of musical individualism. She's most often to be heard these days as a member of both the Hibernia String Trio and the Irish Chamber Orchestra, but last week she joined pianist Roy Holmes for the last of the National Concert Hall 59 String Along concerts at the John Field Room.
Cahill eschews many of the conventions, of the modern day recitalist. Where most players are greatly concerned about matters of projection (the typical cliche is that you have to be sure to reach someone who's sitting in the back row), she adopts a contrary approach. It's almost as if she trusts an unusual inner intensity to draw her listeners towards a soft spoken discourse, in which the exaggerations, common to so much public music making, can be dispensed with.
On Monday, her playing took some time to settle down (there was some wild intonation near the start of Beethoven's A minor Sonata), but the freshness of her imagination, and her unusual ability to balance and sustain long lines were soon attesting to the rightness of her musical vision.
She was quite well supported by pianist Roy Holines in the opening movement of the Beethoven, but there was little sense of true musical partnership in the later movements. The violinist's Kreisler, in the Caprice Vietinois, was tangy and pointed rather than sugary, her Chausson Poeme juxtaposed moments of magic (the trills at the end were wonderfully done) with others where the technical delivery was simply deficient.
The strongest sense of musical partnership was found in the unreconstructed impressionism of Marian Ingoldsby's Waterscape, a piece from 1994 which sounds like it might have been written a good six decades earlier.
The two piano solos - the C minor Prelude and Fugue from Book 2 of Bach's Well Tempered Clavier, and the overtly virtuosic C major Sonata from Beethoven's Op. 2 - were traversed without real distinction or character.
