{TABLE} A Silver Thread (1988) ........... Jane O'Leary The Mooncradle (1996) ............ Eric Sweeney Sextet (1996) .................... Nicola LeFanu {/TABLE} NICOLA LeFanu's sextet, which received its first Irish performance in the Lane Gallery on Sunday, is subtitled "a wild garden fasach". The audience was invited to think of landscapes which appear barren but on closer inspection are teeming with wild flowers.

It is often very difficult to visualise music in this way; and, although the combination of flute, clarinet, violin, cello, percussion and piano was broken down and arranged in various groupings, the resultant variety produced no floral sound picture for me. The short sections, played continuously, never lingered long enough in the one spot to create a more than transient impression. A "wandering airy music perhaps, but the lyrical inspiration was lost in the stylistic and instrumental mixtures.

Jane O'Leary's A Silver Thread was also a "wandering" piece. Like a river (hence the title), the music flowed past, but without any sense of source or estuary. The two parts, violin and percussion, at times produced unusual and beguiling sonorities, yet at other times seemed to belong to different musical traditions and tacked a sense of direction.

Eric Sweeney's song cycle The Mooncradle sets four poems by Padraic Colum and was commissioned by the Newport Music Festival - a festival, the composer old us, for the seriously rich. They must have loved the unashamed nostalgia of words and settings and the composer must have enjoyed revising Irish folk modes for the two central poems. Paul Roe's playing of a version of An Draighnean Down on the clarinet was so beautiful it could have dispensed with any accompaniment, but the work was for soprano, clarinet and piano: Tina Verbeke sang with passion and Jane O'Leary at the piano provided sympathetic support. The work was an unexpected but pleasing jeu d'esprit.