THE Glinka Quartet (Oran Cassidy and David O'Doherty, violins, Elizabeth Csibi, viola, and Moya O'Grady, cello) played a selection of movements from the quartet repertoire, pieces by Handel, Arthur Duff, Pureell, Tchaikovsky, Haydn and Mozart.
Such lollipops can be counted on to receive an automatically favourable response even if they are just played through, as they appeared to be in the lunchtime recital in the NCH John Field Room last Friday.
When the Quartet was joined by Dermot Dunne, who played the harmonium part on his accordion in Dvorak's Bagatelles op 47 for two violins, cello and harmonium, the music was played with greater intensity and precision, but it was in the three items for solo accordion that the recital sprang to life.
Dunne has an astonishing mastery of his instrument and he has to be heard to be believed. His performance of La Campanella (Liszt Paganini) was so fluent, so stylish, so dazzling as well as deep that one wondered if he might not have become a great pianist.
Winter the first movement of Vivaldi's Four Seasons was more successful than might have been expected and Vyatcheslav Semyonov's The Don Rhapsody, a little Mussorgaskian tone poem, showed the accordion to be most apt for Russian melody and rhythm.
