Composers' Choice, Second Series: John Kinsella

String Quartet in F minor, Op 95 - Beethoven

String Quartet in F minor, Op 95 - Beethoven

Scherzo from String Quartet No 2 - John Kinsella

String Quartet No 15 in G (slow movement) - Schubert

Synthesis for String Quartet - John Kinsella

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Reflection II for piano - John Kinsella

Piano Quintet in G minor, Op 57 - Shostakovich

The composers that John Kinsella chose to build his programme around are not so much those that have influenced him as those whose works have qualities to which he aspires. The most important of these qualities is the power of organisation that enables a composer to prolong and develop that first burst of energy or inspiration from which the ideas spring. From the 19th century he chose Beethoven's Op 95 and from the 20th Shostakovich's Piano Quintet. The slow movement of Schubert's last quartet was also included because it provides some of the material used in Kinsella's Synthesis for String Quartet.

These works were performed by the RTE Vanbrugh String Quartet, joined by Finghin Collins for the Shostakovich. The same artists performed with equal dedication the three works by Kinsella which were all that he, in his modesty, allowed time for. The Scherzo from String Quartet No 2 is only three minutes long, although some of its material is re-used, along with the Schubert, in the Synthesis, itself only six minutes long. Reflection II is a short piece commissioned for the 1997 Dublin International Piano Competition, so the flavour of Kinsella in Sunday's concert in the NCH John Field Room was tantalisingly limited.

The Scherzo is tightly organised, but Reflection is predominantly rhapsodic. Probably the most interesting work is the Synthesis, in which there is a strange meeting of two composers: on the one hand, the somewhat edgy idiom of Kinsella, and, on the other, what he himself has called the "almost childlike innocence of Schubert".