THE National Concert Hall has miscalculated again, causing a second Young Platform concert to be moved into the main, auditorium due to the repainting of the John Field Room.
Again, last night's performer, accordionist Dermot Dunne, benefited from the superior acoustic. But it was ridiculously shortsighted of the hall's management to have allowed him on to the stage while members of the audience were still filing into their seats and the door through which they had come was still open. Whatever about the possibility of this disconcerting an old hand, the risk with a young performer is considerably higher.
Dermot Dunne, RTE's Musician of the Future 1996, brought an unusual dreamy wistfulness to his opening group of Scarlatti sonatas. He credited the arrangement of Bach's great D minor Chaconne to Busoni, but then chose to remove swathe after swathe of Busoni's pianistic elaboration on Bach's solo violin original. A better starting point might have been the less well known keyboard arrangement by Brahms, for the left hand only this should transfer without loss to the accordion, and is much more faithful to Bach than Busoni was.
James Wilson's Donizetti Variations, which I don't recall having heard before, were written in 1969 for the Danish virtuoso Mogens Ellegaard. They proved an agreeably light foil to the Bach, with an amusing tuba plus piccolo imitation along the way.
The second half of Dermot Dunne's concert was given over to pieces by composers - identified in the programme only as V Zolotaryov and V Semyonov (no dates, no nationalities) - whose music I have previously encountered only from this performer.
He played the second, third and fourth movements from Zolotaryov's programmatic sounding Sonata No. 3, which ended with a quotation from Schoenberg's Verklaerte Nacht. I couldn't help wondering (especially in the context of a programme only 80 minutes long) what reasoning resulted in the exclusion of the rest of the piece.
Semyonov's Don Rhapsody is a colourful exercise in silly, trivial flashiness. Dermot Dunne played it with an acrobatic aplomb which made it altogether more relishable than anything earlier in his programme. It makes a wonderful showpiece for his unusual talent. But it must be taken as a fair indication of the repertoire challenges facing him as a concert performer on the accordion that so forgettable a concoction should make so disproportionate an impact.
