NCH, Dublin

Glinka – Russlan and Ludmilla Overture. Tchaikovsky – Piano Concerto No 1. Mussorgsky/Rimsky-Korsakov – Night on the Bare Mountain. Khachaturian. Masquerade Suite.

It was almost like the set-up for an insider’s musical joke. What’s the difference between a Romance and a Nocturne?

Well, they’re completely interchangeable, but one of them is also totally forgettable.

The occasion was the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra’s Musical Postcards series.

In the absence of any printed programme notes, Australian conductor Matthew Coorey had stepped into the breach, taken up a microphone, and was introducing the music of the second half of the concert.

However, along with the genuinely useful information he conveyed, he wrongly identified the second movement of Aram Khachaturian's Masquerade Suite(compiled from the music for a 1939 production of Lermontov's play) as a Romance (it is in fact a Nocturne), couldn't remember the title of the fourth (the actual Romance), and called the closing movement a Gopak (a Ukrainian folk dance) when it is in fact a Galop (a 19th-century ballroom dance).

He was on more sure ground in his actual conducting, which was dynamically assertive, and never short of energy.

In fact, if anything, he was rather too keen in pursuing the sharpness of projection he encouraged from the orchestra. The forcefulness of his point-making was not always leavened with subtlety, and in addition to being loud and brash, the effect was sometimes to labour the obvious.

The soloist in the evening’s big work, Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto, was the Derry-born pianist Cathal Breslin.

Breslin took a highly personal approach to this great warhorse of a concerto.

It was as if he were looking for an angle on the music that he could definitively call his own, slowing down where the humour took him, and finding little details to emphasise that other players overlook.

It was very much a hit and miss affair, not always spot-on technically, and the moments of extreme individuality sounded more wayward than convincing.

Coorey’s conducting didn’t show a great deal of sympathy with Breslin’s approach, and left a lot to be desired in terms of tightness of ensemble.

But the general liveliness of the evening had a sense of purpose that was much more winning than the rather unfocused approach of the previous week’s concert.