Reviewed today is the performance of guitarist Craig Ogden in Dublin

Craig Ogden (guitar)

Odessa Club, Dame Court

Michael Dervan

Tippett - The Blue Guitar. Benjamin Dwyer - Voces Criticas. Nigel Westlake - The Hinchenbrook Riffs. Hans Werner Henze - Drei Tentos. Steve Reich - Electric Counterpoint

The Mostly Modern concert series and festival have had a bad year. The festival's focus on Italian composer Aldo Clementi last March was, sadly, a job poorly done, and the closure of the Bank of Ireland Arts Centre last summer left Mostly Modern without a home.

The series is soldiering on. It has been renamed Music 21, and has become a peripatetic operation, with this programme from Australian guitarist Craig Ogden surfacing in the rarefied confines of the Odessa Club in Dame Court.

The intimacy of such a small space, the size of a handful of domestic rooms, is actually of great benefit to an instrument such as the guitar, which can struggle to make an impact in normal concert environments. As luck would have it, the noises that were filtering into the room were actually persistent enough to warrant the use of a modest boost of electronic amplification.

Ogden's stage manner is highly informal, and he does a nice line in dry, self-deprecating humour. He also plays contemporary music with fluency and insight, not always impeccable in the finest details, but unfailingly sure in capturing and conveying the bigger picture.

His programme included three staples of the modern guitar repertoire, Michael Tippett's rather dry-sounding The Blue Guitar being eclipsed on this occasion by the compact lyricism of Hans Werner Henze's Drei Tentos and the minimalist layering of Steve Reich's Electric Counterpoint for guitar and tape.

Australian composer and clarinettist Nigel Westlake's Hinchenbrook Riffs allowed Ogden to play a live duet with himself, courtesy of the technology of digital delay. The style of this piece was a popsy minimalism.

Benjamin Dwyer's Voces Criticas is a kind of meta-étude which poses technical challenges with an air of the cogency and savoir-faire of, say, the piano studies of Chopin, Liszt and Ligeti.

How many playing fingers can a guitarist seem to have, he wants to ask.

Can the instrument mimic the kind of multilayered fading in and out that the mixing desk or computer control of the electro-acoustic medium provides?

The answer in Ogden's tour-de-force performance was a resounding yes.

Dwyer's work was featuring in some elevated compositional company and Ogden's playing on this occasion made it outshine everything else.