Isabelle O'Connell's programme in the Hugh Lane Gallery last Sunday was thoughtfully chosen and thoughtfully played.

Isabelle O'Connell (piano)

Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin

Chaconne................................................................Sofia Gubaidulina

Sonata 1.X.1905......................................................................Janacek

Ye that pipe and ye that play: Along the flaggy shore .....Philip Martin

Piano Sonata Op. 26..................................................................Barber

All the works looked back to established traditions but at the same time hesitated on the threshold of modernism. Gubaidulina's Chaconne opened very boldly with brusque overloaded chords but as it progressed became more conventional and only the player's skill prevented it from sounding arid.

Jánacek's commemorative Sonata, dated 1.X.1905, with its ominous sub-titles - "The Presentiment: The Death" - offered welcome opportunities for expressive interpretation and one could sense the performer's empathy with the way the music embellished the feelings aroused by the event.

Philip Martin's pair of pieces, whose titles suggest a Yeatsian vision of pastoral, was almost tongue in cheek, for the music of the pipers and players summoned up images of nymphs in top hats and tails and the flaggy shore was a deserted waste. The pianist captured the quirkiness of the one and the desolation of the other.

The greatest challenge was presented by Barber's Sonata where the emotional and intellectual aspects have equal importance; the obviously romantic afflatus threatens to take over, swamping the structure, but is never allowed to do so.

The resulting sense of struggle gives the sonata its power and here Isabelle O'Connell, without indulging in rhodomontade, gave full emphasis to the romantic and never devalued formal considerations - Douglas Sealy.

Geraldine O'Doherty (harp) and associates

NCH John Field Room

Sonata for Flute, Viola and Harp; Sonata for Cello and Piano; Sonata for Violin and Piano: Danse sacree et profane.......................Debussy

What one might call the typical Debussy sound was most evident in the Sonata for Flute, Viola and Harp, performed by Marie Comiskey (flute), Nicholas Fielding (viola) and Geraldine O'Doherty (harp). This languorous music, depicting an imaginary Arcadia where virtue and vice dissolve into each other, is a product of the French attraction to the Orient, and I found the flute-playing too "virtuous" in those moments when the music seems to swoon in a hashish-inspired dream. The dance-like sections, more down to earth, found the flute more at home in the general rhythmic liveliness.

The other work for harp, the Danse sacrée et profane, though written earlier that the above, has a similar orientation, as can be gathered from its title. Harp and viola of the Sonata were joined by David O'Doherty and Lisa McLoughlin (violins), Moya O'Grady (cello), and Aura Stone (double bass). It is quite a show-piece for harp and Geraldine O'Doherty proved herself an accomplished performer.

Last Sunday's recital in the NCH John Field Room was welcome, especially for the chance to hear those two works featuring the harp, but the Sonatas for cello and piano and violin and piano, offer more nourishing musical sustenance. Rachel Quinn played the piano, first with Moya O'Grady (cello) and then with David O'Doherty (violin). The readings were temperate, presenting the music in an intimate, almost confidential way, missing out on the drama perhaps, but not straying beyond the bounds of chamber-music - Douglas Sealy

Dominic Thomas/Dobhar Eider Tuath

Triskel Arts Centre, Cork

Good conceptual art, by its very nature, tends to be challenging and thought-provoking. However, if the concept is wilfully obscure or exclusionist, then the whole experience can become rather frustrating. Despite the expected challenges in disentangling meaning within his installation, this view could not be allied to Dominic Thomas's work, as there are many viable and meaningful points of entry for the viewer.

Essentially, Thomas takes a philosophical bent as he considers the interconnectedness of things within physical, geo-political or moral realms of experience. The starting point for this is disarmingly simplistic, as the central visual content of the installation comprises of a myriad of plastic bottle-tops collected over a four-year period along the coastlines of Ireland, Britain and Brittany. These are suspended from the ceiling to form fragile barriers across the space - physically, their presence is suggestive of the impermanent boundaries and movement between the Celtic nations, echoing the growth of language and culture between them.

Movement of Atlantic Ocean currents is the vehicle for this distribution and is represented in the installation by an animated sequence of arrows swirling in a beautifully hypnotic pattern. The ease with which the central premise of this installation can be processed by the viewer is admittedly made easier by Thomas's accompanying essay, but enough is left unsaid for you to draw your own conclusions. The ideas can even be put aside as the veil-like walls of bottle-tops have a beauty and eloquence in themselves which transcends their humble origins. So much so that there is sense of childlike wonder and curiosity which seems to grow the more time you spend with the work - Mark Ewart

Continues until Thursday

The Bitter End

Sugar Club, Dublin

Metamorphosing polyrhythms, explosively percussive guitars and the occasional ponderous and self-important song . . . This was the stuff of The Bitter End, a monthly club hosted by Leeson Street's The Sugar Club with considerable panache. It's a venue to die for. Wood-panelled walls, plush banquette seating and a pristine sound system render the rest of Dublin's night-life eminently cruddy by comparison.

Breda Mayock, emerging singer and baby sister of Emer (an unavoidable reference point, particularly since the younger sibling made hardly a whit of effort to establish her own identity with her audience) is lucky enough to possess an above-average pair of vocal chords but insists on using them as though they were forever in hock to the highest note. Her ponderous, plodding set varied little in tone or pace, and her phrasing had all the subtlety of a sledgehammer.

Mexican guitarists Rodrigo Y Gabriela, swore that theirs was no colour-by- numbers flamenco, and even the most rhythmically illiterate needed little convincing.

Gabriela's sensual congress with her six-string was countered by Rodrigo's insistent percussive playing, and yet both managed to shift effortlessly from pounding out primal rhythms to the most complex finger styles, applied in equal force and intensity to Dave Brubeck's Take Five and a rake of their own material. Spellbinding.

Ollie Cole and Ronán Ó Snodaigh stilled the crowd with sets that were pitch-perfectly naïve and tiptoeingly soothing in turn. Cole's identity outside of his regular band, Turn, is an enviable mix of disarming charm and bare, naked lyrics. Ó Snodaigh is an hypnotic performer, albeit prone to the occasional ego trip as he checks his personal feng shui as regularly as his vocal chords for guidance in his repertoire.

Nonetheless, Tiptoe and a handful of his other blindingly percussive pieces mesmerised from the get go.

Then there was Robbie Harris's transforming bodhrán, a veritable one-man force throughout the night. And a surprise visit from Brian Kennedy treated us to one of the most sublime voices this side of Nirvana, freed of the precious over-production that can mar his recordings.

The irritating ego-tripping antics of the MC, Clint Velour, aside, nights don't come too much more pleasurable than this - Siobhán Long

The Bitter End runs again at the Sugar Club on February 10th. The line-up is not confirmed. Information on 01-6787188