Mozart Variations - von Schweinitz

Rhapsody on a theme of Paganini - Rachmaninov

Symphony No 9 - Bruckner

Friday's subscription concert by the National Symphony Orchestra was to have featured a new commission from Belfast composer Michael Alcorn. That has been postponed, and the substitution was Wolfgang von Schweinitz's Mozart Variations, which the orchestra performed last July in conjunction with Dublin Master Classes' international orchestral conducting course.

It's an early work (from 1976) in the output of a composer now in his late 40s and it allows listeners troubled by the musical vocabulary of the late 20th century to have their cake and eat it. The minor key mood of the theme, from Mozart's Masonic Funeral Music, K477, hovers in the background, moving in and out of earshot within a compact, individually coloured conception.

Individuality of rhythmic trajectory is one of the most striking features of pianist Miceal O'Rourke's performances with orchestra. The free flow of his playing is not always easy for conductors to anticipate and accommodate, nor is it always clear to the listener exactly what in the printed score might have occasioned any particularly unusual excursion. What is usually clear, however, as it was on Friday in Rachmaninov's Paganini Rhapsody, is the thrill audiences experience from the dangers of the journey.

Conductor Gerhard Markson's handling of Bruckner's Ninth Symphony was tight and disciplined. The wealth of rubato hardly distracted from the feeling that Markson sees the work with unusual clarity, making for a reading which preferred straightforward assertion to the expected aura of mystery.