It is always interesting to hear a composer play his own work; and on Sunday John Gibson played four of his own works in the John Field Room. Two of them - I see his blood upon the rose and Le spectre de la rose - were originally song settings but, adapted for piano solo, they made agreeable miniatures. Even more charming was The Music Box, a wholly delightful Christmas present. A more considerable piece was Nijinsky 1998, a rewritten and expanded version of the Nijinksy he wrote in the 1970s. This effectively traces the dancer's brief but brilliant career, and his decline into a twilight zone is marked by the obsessive repetition of his work.

Gibson seems happiest in short spans; his own works, and Reverie and Remembrance by Esposito, were much more successful than Mozart's Fantasia in D minor or Chopin's Fantaisie in F minor. Both of these works tended to fragment and an over-emphatic technique hampered their continuity. The short mazurkas by Chopin fared better; even if not as delicately played as they might have been, they were free of the suggestion of an extra-musical significance that dogged the two Impromptus.