Arvo Pärt - Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten. Vivaldi - Treble Recorder Concerto in C minor RV441. Sinfonia in G RV146. Sammartini - Descant Recorder Concerto in F. Sopranino Recorder Concerto in C RV443. Bruch - Octet.

The antics of recorder player Piers Adams are familiar to Irish audiences through his appearances with his ensemble Red Priest.

He's currently on his debut tour with the Irish Chamber Orchestra. I caught up with the tour at the CIT Cork School of Music on Friday.

His playing of concertos by Vivaldi and Sammartini was reminiscent of certain youth TV presenters in gushingly full flow.

He wore different outfits for each of the three concertos, took typically unbridled fast tempos, and jazzed up the orchestral parts with effects derived entirely from the taste of our own time.

He progressed from treble recorder (in Vivaldi's Concerto in C minor, RV441) to descant (for Sammartini's Concerto in F) to sopranino (for Vivaldi's Concerto in C, RV443).

As he pointed out in his spoken introductions, the dominance of the descant (the school recorder par excellence) is a recent phenomenon.

But such were the imbalances between soloist's light-toned instruments and the robust-sounding players of the Irish Chamber Orchestra that the smaller the instrument Adams used, and the more penetrating its tone, the more musically persuasive the presentation became.

Adams is a recorder player of no mean agility.

It seems a pity that he's allowed himself to become sidetracked by issues that often have more to do with showmanship than music.

There was, rightly, no showmanship in the layered, multiple-speed, slow-motion cascades of Arvo Pärt's Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten which Katherine Hunka directed from the first violin.

The performance, however, didn't seem to take adequate account of the sparsity of tone available from such a small group of players (less than a third of the number the composer specifies in the score), and the resulting, often oddly-accented, sound was thin and undernourished.

The closing work, Bruch's rarely-heard Octet, played in the string orchestra version authorised by the composer was, by contrast, entirely successful.

This piece is from the opposite end of the composer's career to the famous G minor Violin Concerto.

Although it was written in 1920, in a world that had heard Elektra and The Rite of Spring and lived through the ravages of a horrendous war, it's actually a piece that seems to have been conceived in an unreconstructed spirit of the mid 19th century.

Hunka and the Irish Chamber Orchestra played it with a romantic commitment that was as persuasive as it was unswerving. And in Cork's new Curtis auditorium, the sound was first-rate.

Tour continues to Sligo, Castlebar and Clifden

Kraggerud, RTÉ NSO/Markson  - NCH, Dublin

Ligeti - Atmosphères. Sibelius - Violin Concerto. Stravinsky - Petrushka (1947).

This was an excellent programme of top-flight, aptly contrasted works. It began with one of the seminal orchestral works of our time, Ligeti's Atmosphères (1961).

The music's fame and influence rest on far more than Kubrick's celebrated use of it in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey.

I wonder if anyone since has surpassed Ligeti's perfect congruence of technique and purpose.

His exploration of sound, via dense, gradually shifting textures, still seems mesmerisingly different and pure - as if it has risen above melody, harmony and rhythm.

I also wonder if I have ever heard the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra play more quietly en masse than in the opening seconds of this concert.

So it was unfortunate both that the National Concert Hall's acoustic worked against the quietest passages, especially in middle registers, and that in these same passages some parts of the orchestra were at or beyond their limits of  control.

The work's impressiveness endured; but it could have been much stronger.

The high-octane intensity of the soloist in Sibelius's Violin Concerto was impressive in a different way.

Henning Kraggerud has bravura; but he's also a listener, aware of how the details of the violin's virtuosic writing mesh with the orchestra, and of his relationship to large-scale design.

I have heard more moving performances of this concerto, but rarely one that was so consistently gripping, despite some bouts of frustratingly unfocused orchestral playing.

Focus was never a problem in the concert's second half, devoted to the 1947 version of Petrushka.

The neo-classical thinking behind Stravinsky's revisions to a work that first appeared in 1911 were evident in the way that the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra and conductor Gerhard Markson went at it - cleanly, vigorously, with rhythmic precision, and full of the bustling life that Stravinsky captured so well. - Martin Adams