Making a Song and Dance - Michael Alcorn

Song of the Half-Cracked Echo - Marion Ingoldsby

Nightpiece (1997) - David Fennessy

The Waterford Suite (1997) - Rhona Clarke

Kid Gloves (1997) - Frank Lyons

Concorde's midday recital in the Lane Gallery presented new and recent music by five Irish composers. David Fennessy's Night piece for flute, clarinet, violin and cello was con ceived as a choral setting of Joyce's poem of that name, but the composer decided he could represent the emotional gloom of the words - "night's sindark nave" - more effectively in purely instrumental form.

The chaconne-like opening, using alto flute and bass clarinet, set the mood of the piece which fluctuated much as in the poem, the text of which was thoughtfully provided in the programme with Night piece Fennessy was winner of the New Music for Sligo Competition (1997).

Alcorn's Making a Song and Dance was, I gathered, his first use of traditional rather than electronic means and was inspired by Hamilton Harty's setting of The Lasses of Donaghadee. The ensemble of clarinet, violin, cello and piano sounded very like Alcorn in electronic mode and not a bit like Harty.

Marion Ingoldsby's setting of a poem by Robert Nye took a difficult text and added difficult music with a complex vocal line. A purely instrumental version might have been more satisfactory than the soprano and piano we heard.

Resolution and Carousel for cello and piano were two movements from Rhona Clarke's Waterford Suite. Carousel is, she told us, "unashamedly in six-eight time throughout", but it turned out to be far from populist and in some ways less conventional than the frankly atonal Resolution.

Kid Gloves by Frank Lyons, for flute, clarinet, violin, cello and percussion was a cheerful exercise in jazzy minimalism with a central interlude of viscous romanticism, a welcome musical joke after the weighty seriousness of the rest of the programme.