{TABLE} Clarinet Concerto No 2 ......................... Crusell Cello Concerto ................................. Elgar Tuba Concerto .................................. Vaughan Williams Accordion Concerto No 1......................... Zolotaryov Piano Concerto in A, K414 ...................... Mozart {/TABLE} THERE was no lack of contrast at the National Concert Hall last night, when five young musicians competed in concerto performance for the title RTE Musician of the Future 1996. There would, I suppose, have been contrast enough in hearing a sequence of works featuring, successively, clarinet, cello, tuba, accordion and piano in a solo capacity. The contrast, however, was heightened not only through differences in style of repertoire, but also through differences in musical approach.
The opening clarinet concerto, by the early 19th century Finn, Crusell, was handled by Carol McGonnell with disciplined, musicianly tact. Her approach was one which acknowledged the music's classical leanings by seeking for a delicate subtlety of nuance rather than any extroversion of musical gesture.
The cellist Gerald Peregrine gave what was obviously a strongly felt account of the Elgar concerto. This work demands and was accorded a more developed sense of performance rhetoric than Crusell, but the urgency of projection (as, indeed, the many moments of inwardness did not entirely avoid the pitfall of exaggeration, and the musical interest generated in this performance turned out to "be more momentary than cumulative.
The repertoire for tuba and accordion imposes severe limitations of choice. The tuba player Conor O'Riordan had, in Vaughan Williams's concerto, the better piece, and he was at his most musically successful in passages calling for substance and solidity of tone.
The First Accordion Concerto by Vladislav Zolotaryov (1942-75) is a cheaply decorated jackdaw's nest of a piece, in the style of purest Soviet era Kitsch. Yet the persuasive power of the young virtuoso accordionist Dermot Dunne was such that he almost managed to keep one on tenterhooks in spite of the cheapness of the music's effects. This was quite an achievement, and if his musical taste extends beyond the 20th century Russian repertoire one can easily imagine that Irish composers will soon be queuing up for his services.
The final competitor, David Quigley, chose one of Mozart's smaller scale piano concertos, K414, and, with untypical insensitivity, handled it with the monotony of a rather too insistent finger study.
It would be hard to quibble with the jury's decision to award the £5,000 top prize to the extraordinarily accomplished young accordionist. And the two section winners (composition and ensemble), ineligible for the top prize, also seemed well merited.
These contributions I heard over the radio, after a quick dash home Elaine Agnew's Philip's Peace, a rhapsodic, repetitive, contemplative threnody for cello and piano, not the most adventurous of works to have surfaced in this competition, but certainly one of the most self assured and a movement from the Brahms Piano Quintet played by the Primavera Piano Quintet from Cork, without a doubt one of the most promising of young chamber ensembles to have emerged in Ireland in recent years.
