NCH, Dublin
Brahms – Klavierstücke Op 118. Debussy – Pour le piano. Sean Doherty – long after sudden flash. Schumann – Fantasiestücke Op 12. Stravinsky – Three Movements from Petrushka.
One of the most important things you need to know about pianist Fiachra Garvey, this year’s National Concert Hall Rising Star, is that he has a following.
That was made clear by the crowd of cheering fans who turned up to support him at the 2009 Dublin International Piano Competition, where he made it to the second round, and took the Brennan Prize for the highest- placed Irish competitor. And there was an atmosphere of supportive enthusiasm in the audience’s responses at the Rising Star recital on Thursday, too.
The young musicians who appear in the Rising Star series seem to have unusually conservative taste, and mostly present programmes that wouldn’t have seemed out of place 50 or even 100 years ago. The NCH, however, forces them to play something new, by holding the Jerome Hynes Composers’ Competition in time to deliver a new work for the occasion.
The 2010 Hynes Competition was won by Seán Doherty, whose long after sudden flashtook inspiration from Samuel Beckett's Not I. The piece is busily unsettled, recursive, insistent, floating moments of not quite consonance into the prevailing dissonance.
Garvey played it with what seemed just the right kind of scattergun energy, and he applied himself with similar brio to Stravinsky's notoriously demanding Three Movements from Petrushka. This was not the tidiest or best-controlled of performances. But it showed a performer willing to take risks and stretch himself in a work that most Irish pianists fight shy of.
The evening's staples were by Brahms, Debussy and Schumann, and were delivered with what might best be called unsophisticated warmth. The best-sounding performance was of Debussy's Pour le piano, which was presented with far greater strength of character than either the Brahms or Schumann.
