NCH, Dublin

Schumann

— Manfred Overture

Chopin

— Piano Concerto No 2

Strauss

— Ein Heldenleben

The actual date of the bicentenary of Chopin’s birth is March 1st, 2010, but the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra got in early, by including the composer’s F minor Piano Concerto, the first to be written, but not so numbered, because it was the second to be published.

The soloist was the Paris-based Dubliner, Míceál O’Rourke, who pursues the music of Chopin with a devotion unrivalled by any other Irish pianist. His approach, however, is hardly what you would call conventional. The “glittering brilliance” promised by RTÉ’s publicity seemed to be of little concern to him. His playing tended towards a deliberative didacticism, as if he wanted to lay bare the bones of the music, by slowing down much of the elaborate melodic decoration, and anchoring the harmony with heavy emphasis on the lowest notes of the left-hand patterning.

In short, he worked the music rather too hard, and the effect was to create an unsettling expectation of stalling that was out of keeping with the actual tempos that he set.

Conductor Giordani Bellincampi took a simpler, more fluid and lyrical approach, and buttressed the orchestral contributions with well-sculpted bass lines. The concerto was framed by Schumann's Byronic ManfredOverture and Richard Strauss's self-regarding Ein Heldenleben (A Hero's Life), a self-portrait of the composer in heroic guise. Bellincampi captured well the dark stresses of

the Schumann, and conveyed the elaborate conceits of the Strauss — including portraits of enemies, battles and closest companion — with light-toned clarity.

If anything, he thinned out the rich density of the Teutonic orchestral undergrowth a little too much, removing an essential gravitas and resolving too many of the musical conflicts that had made Strauss such an enfant terribleof late 19th-century music. It was only at the very end, appropriately enough in the hero's "fulfilment", that Bellincampi secured the necessary weight of sound as well as the blaze and impact.