The jazz elements of this year's festival finished on an unforgettable high with three remarkable concerts in St Canice's Cathedral, given by three of the foremost talents on the contemporary European jazz scene.
The concerts featured Misha Alperin, born in Moldova, raised in the Ukraine and now based in Oslo, John Taylor, from Manchester, and Italian wunderkind Stefano Bollani.
Although all three could claim a common link in their admiration for the great American pianist Bill Evans, such was their divergence of approach that essentially this "influence" amounted only to no more than a reference point.
Alperin, whose concert was the first of the day, was closest of the three to classical music, but his mixture of this, jazz and eastern European ethnic musical elements defies easy categorisation.
The core of his performance was an eight-piece suite, Vayam, which had traces of the impact of some time spent in Bali, notably in the lovely, scalar opening part. Alperin, who has, in common with the others, technique to burn, took it through a number of graceful variations before resolving them beautifully in the close.
The remaining pieces of the suite, which had a through-composed feel, embraced a range of often contrasting moods. Although occasionally the juxtapositions seemed somewhat arbitrary, the sixth section, an exhilarating, complex dance, and the seventh, with a plangently lovely melody to establish its character, were particularly successful.
To finish, Alperin revealed his more poetic side with another original composition, Nostalgia, a mournful, spare and simple melody put through some lovely variations, all handled with great delicacy, and he showed a wryly humorous side with I'm A Norwegian Lady.
As an encore, he treated the audience to the beautiful tribute to Bill Evans and Chopin from his CD Blue Fjord.
John Taylor is probably closest in spirit of the three pianists to Bill Evans and it was no coincidence that his later concert produced some of the most sublime playing of the day. Although he began with one of his own compositions, Prelude, which opened with some beautifully ambiguous, Debussyesque chords to set up an exquisite improvisation, he was also unequivocally within the jazz fold.
Two originals, Pure And Simple and Between Moons, along with Steve Swallow's Vaguely Asian, underlined his superb harmonic imagination, implacable grasp of time and his ability to produce wonderfully rounded, satisfyingly coherent performances.
It got better. Two ballads, his own Bold Song, a haunting piece with an endlessly questing aura, and the discursive Tramonto were utterly captivating evidence of the poetic side of his artistic persona, while Kenny Wheeler's Everybody's Song But My Own and his own Ambleside drew some astonishing, two-handed interplay in wide-ranging, brilliantly imaginative solos. He finished a breath-taking concert with a gentle ballad of the utmost simplicity, Visa Til Karin.
Stefano Bollani's closing performance, a few hours later, was a welcome contrast. No less technically gifted or imaginative than the others, he introduced a more overtly humorous element. Approaching familiar material with an obliqueness amounting to stealth, he turned pieces like On The Street Where You Live and Tico Tico into fantasias of sheer virtuosic fun, full of swift changes of mood and direction, even incorporating outrageous hints of the venerable stride piano style.
But he could also use the same approach with haunting delicacy; perhaps the finest, most moving performance of the night was a gorgeously revealed The Man I Love, no less poetic than anything done by John Taylor. And he offered two dazzlingly elegant performances of Ginestera compositions from his Argentinian Dances.
Throughout, he invested the music with much of his personal warmth and charm. By the close he had the audience in the palm of his hand, turning the hackneyed Für Elise, with jumps and repeated notes to mimic the damaged grooves of an old 78rpm record, into a memorably funny experience.
And, in a final flourish, he took requests from the audience and wove the almost ridiculously diverse results into a brilliant medley. It was a fitting end to a day which produced emphatic confirmation of the depth and variety of European jazz piano. - Ray Comiskey
Gerard Gillen (organ) - St Michael's, Dún Laoghaire
Bach/Stockmeier - Fantasia in C BWV573. Purcell - Voluntary in G Croft - Voluntary in A minor
Mozart - Fantasy in F minor K608 Schumann - Studies Op 56 Nos 4 & 5 Henryk Górecki - Kantata Op 26
Bach - Passacaglia in C minor
Gerard Gillen rarely fails to turn up with something unusual or unexpected when he performs at St Michael's Church in the annual recital series which he founded back in 1974.
Here the most unusual of his inclusions was the Kantata by the Polish composer Henryk Górecki, whose style when he wrote this work in 1968 was worlds away from the manner of the Symphony of Sorrowful Songs which shot him to fame in the 1990s.
The plaintive symphony, written in 1976, is separated from the organ piece by only eight years, but the organ writing is pure 1960s aggressive avant-garde, created with all the density and the fondness for clustery sonic masses that made Górecki's compatriot Krzysztof Penderecki one of the emblematic figures of that optimistic decade.
Gillen played the Górecki with a spirit of vigorous engagement. Yet, in the bold, blunt gestures of the Kantata, the composer's organ writing didn't show the ear for colour, rhetoric or detail that marked out the best of Penderecki's work in this style.
The programme made obeisance to two of this year's major musical anniversaries by including pieces not originally written for organ - the Fantasy in F minor, K608, which Mozart wrote for a mechanical instrument, and two of the studies Schumann wrote for pedal piano, an ill-fated 19th-century attempt to extend the reach of the piano by grafting on an organ-style pedal board.
Two early English voluntaries provided a pre-18th-century strand in the evening, the one by Henry Purcell delivered with an almost improvisatory feel, the other by William Croft sounding much stricter in construction.
And the recital was framed by Bach, familiar (the great Passacaglia in C minor) and unfamiliar (a fragmentary Fantasia in C, BWV573, in a version completed by Wolfgang Stockmeier).
Gillen is very much a player who grasps the big picture in the music he plays, sometimes sacrificing a moment or two of rhythmic detail along the way. In this performance the manner was always rewarding, climaxing in the Bach passacaglia, laid out with a grand, stately inevitability which was also, given Bach's genius, ever full of surprises. - Michael Dervan
