Joshua Bell put the music of Karl Goldmark to the stiffest of tests at the latest NCH/The Irish Times Celebrity Series concert on Sunday night. The audience had arrived expecting to hear something else entirely. But instead of opening with a work of Brahms's maturity - the Sonata in A, Op 100 - the American virtuoso offered three movements from Goldmark's Suite in D, Op. 11.

The appeal to Bell and his partner Simon Mulligan was evident from their performance. Goldmark's rather grand rhetoric presents players with an effective display vehicle. But the heightened expression of the delivery wasn't matched by content of any real substance.

Schubert's Fantasy in C is a work that's hard to hold together. The "heavenly length" that Schumann attributed to the Great C major Symphony is not a quality that I've ever heard anyone attributing to the Fantasy, and Bell's only momentarily interesting performance certainly outstayed its welcome.

Happily, the 20th-century music of the second half found both players on altogether more rewarding terrain. The third and most popular of Ysae's solo sonatas responded well to Bell's coolly penetrating gaze. And Ravel's jazz-influenced Sonata, also written in the mid-1920s, was given a reading of feathery lightness.

The encores could hardly have been more contrasting. The Meditation from Massenet's Thais was restrained and chaste. Wieniawski's Polonaise in D found both performers engaging with equal relish in the work's tautly-sprung energy.