Partita No 2 - Bach

Images I - Debussy

Out of Doors Suite - Bartok

Sonata in B flat D960 - Schubert

The young Dublin pianist, Finghin Collins, last month scored the biggest success of his career to date, when he took first prize in the Clara Haskil Competition in Switzerland. Coming back to play to the home crowd isn't the easiest of undertakings in the circumstances. And the Bank of Ireland Arts Centre, where he played on Tuesday, has never been an easy venue for piano recitals, with its dryish acoustic and smaller than concert grand piano (a strange short-sightedness for a wealthy bank).

The easiest thing to report is that Collins remains himself. No major transformations are identifiable in his post-Haskil playing. His Bach is still light and pretty, treble-dominated, and anything but contrapuntally dense or argumentative. His Debussy and Bartok were new to me. The Debussy Images sounded hasty without being particularly fast. The natural rise and fall of this music is not yet at his command. The control of dynamics as well as the layering of sound and the voicing of chords all sounded decidedly unidiomatic.

The Bartok Out of Doors Suite contains the sort of keyboard challenges that Collins is clearly capable of relishing. At the moment he's tidying up some of the edges that need to be rough. The harsh dissonances need more than force to become persuasive. They need to sound massive, too. And that means facing up to more elemental expressive demands than Collins has yet shown to be at his command.

The late Schubert Sonata in B flat, one of his competition offerings, was given a reading that was strangely balanced. The opening two movements were as bright and unburdened, almost, as you could imagine hearing them played. The expressive weight in this performance, fell, as I have never heard it before, on the Scherzo and Finale.

Throughout the evening, it has to be said, there was never that frisson you feel entitled to expect from someone who has dismissed all in his way to take the top prize at an international competition. The first suggestion of that came in the encore, Schumann's Abegg Variations, done in attention-grabbing style and with a young man's fingerflying glee. It was as if, unburdened by having completed the evening's formal duties, Collins's spirit flew with an altogether new and different freedom.