NCH, Dublin

Mozart – Piano Concertos in E flat K271; in A K414; in D minor K466.

The RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra inaugurated one of this season’s major new projects in fine style at the National Concert Hall on Friday.

The orchestra’s new associate artist, pianist Finghin Collins, gave the first instalment of a three-year cycle of the complete Mozart piano concertos. And he opted to throw himself in at the deep end in the opening programme, by directing three concertos from the keyboard.

This is actually quite a perilous undertaking. Full eye-contact between pianist and orchestra is achieved by placing the soloist, conductor-like, with his back to most of the audience, and seating him at a piano with the lid removed. The absence of the lid can result in a loss of focus in piano tone, and it also sometimes seems to change the nature of a player’s responses to the instrument.

Collins, as it turned out, seemed almost completely unhindered by any of these issues. From the start he imposed a very clear musical vision on the orchestra. He wanted his Mozart to sound lighter and more transparent than is the NSO’s norm. He encouraged the violins to play more quietly and to yield to the wind players. And he had the horns show an alertness and bite that often gave them a sharper profile, while still remaining complementary rather than dominating.

I know it may seem topsy-turvy to concentrate on the extra litheness of the orchestral playing. But that litheness was a key factor that distinguished Collins’s Mozart from the RTÉ NSO norm. One of the abiding visual memories of the evening is that of his left hand in the air, motioning gently downwards, to caution the orchestra to play more quietly.

Collins’s three chosen works included what you might call the first of Mozart’s mature piano concertos, the Concerto in E flat, K271, completed in the month of the composer’s 21st birthday. Collins’s account was both spry and probing, though he became a little too ambitious and stretched himself too far in the headlong pace he set for the finale.

His approach was more carefree but less finely nuanced in the Concerto in A, K414, written five years later. And he fully engaged with the stormy undertones of the great Concerto in D minor, K466, one of the few Mozart concertos to be prized during the 19th-century, when it was admired for its Beethovenian qualities.