{TABLE} Ritual Dance............... Patrick Zuk Piano Concerto............. Moszkowski Symphony in D minor........ Franck {/TABLE} PATRICK Zuk's Ritual Dance (or Ritual Dance/Taniec Obrzedowy to give the piece its full title) has been a long time coming.
It was originally billed for performance by the National Symphony Orchestra in 1992 and again in 1995, before finally making its first appearance at the National Concert Hall last night, conducted by Albert Rosen.
Zuk, who is in his late 20s, is from Cork and is nowadays better known as a pianist - he's a refined and sensitive accompanist - than as a composer. His father is Polish (whence the unusual surname) and there's an intentionally clear Polish tang in the music of the Ritual Dance (though, oddly, the folk-flavoured music I was most reminded of by it, was that of the Hungarian, Kodaly).
The piece is divided into two sections, Invocation and Dance, and the music, scored throughout with colourful effectiveness, thrives on a hectic, driven energy. It's by no means economically conceived and the final resolution doesn't quite manage to fit the scale of what precedes it.
The second composer in last night's NSO programme was also of Polish descent. Moritz Moszkowski (1854-1925) is today remembered for a series of highly successful piano duets, though there have always been pianists who featured some of his solo bon-bons as encores.
His four-movement Piano Concerto is at best a light and scintillating piece, the sort which needs a very special kind of advocacy to please a modern audience. It sounded rather plain from Piers Lane, who, although he has made a well-received recording (which I've not heard), seemed set on tackling the piece with too much a sense of etude-like determination.
In the second half, the Franck Symphony surged agreeably and Albert Rosen handled the piece with clarity and luminosity. His tempo for the finale, however, seemed on the fast side (the composer cautions "Allegro non troppo") and this resulted in an undue amounts of holding back to compensate.
