AXA Dublin International Piano Competition, Semi-Finals National Concert Hall, Dublin: The 59 competitors have been reduced to six. And, having heard all of them in the first round, I can't imagine how anyone could have accurately predicted which six would survive to the finals.
Some were predicting early on that Antti Siirala, from Finland, was a likely winner. I wasn't among them, although I wanted him to make it into the second round. He seemed a seasoned performer from the start, and in Mozart's Sonata in F, K533, he showed communicative concerns for his listeners - a desire to show them things about the music rather than things about himself - that few other competitors exhibited to the same extent. At the same time, some capricious gestures impinged on the expressive core of his Mozart, and his handling of one of Brahms's early ballades seemed to become seriously overblown. But he has held his own since then, and his semi-final performance of two late Beethoven sonatas (Op 109 in E and Op 110 in A flat) added significantly to the perception, gained from his Debussy Études in Round 2, that he is already a mature artist with an individual voice and a clear and interesting perspective.
Siirala is 23. The Israeli pianist Matan Porat is two years younger and, by curious coincidence, played all four of Brahms's early ballades in the opening round, erring by contrast on the side of modesty of expression. Mariko Sano from Japan played the first two ballades better than either but didn't make it beyond the opening round.
Porat comes across as an unassuming player, musically focused and, to borrow an image from Stravinsky, a vessel through which the music easily passes. There was, for instance, a satisfying plainness to his treatment of Mozart's Sonata in A, K331, in the semi-finals that, for some reason, would not have led one fully to expect him to master the technical demands of Ravel's Miroirs as adequately as he did. The closeness of his identification with the music may be what allows him to spring such surprises.
The other surprises of the semi-finals were less pleasant. The performance of Beethoven's Diabelli Variations by Heidi Hau (27, USA) was laboured enough to become tedious - and it was surprising to find this pupil of competition director and jury chairman John O'Conor blithely sailing past the competition's time limits.
Siirala, Porat and Hau have all secured places in the finals, as have Brenda Jones (24, USA), who didn't seem to show a real poetic grasp of Schumann's Fantasy in C, Op 17 (although she handled the precarious leaps of the second movement with daring), Andrey Ponochevny (26, Belarus), whose grand Russian manner didn't fully mask a certain coarseness of musical response, and Li Wang (29, Canada), who captured the melancholy of the Liszt arrangement of Schubert's Der Müller Und Der Bach but in Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody No 12 and Mussorgsky's Pictures At An Exhibition stormed the barn a bit too readily and consistently.
I was sorry to see the disappearance of Juho Pohjonen (22, Finland), whose Bach (Chromatic Fantasy And Fugue) and Prokofiev (Sonata No 8) held more interest than the performances of most of the finalists.
Marco Fatichenti (22, Italy), one of the hardest-hitting players in the first round, may have damaged his chances by an unsettling series of small lapses in a strongly and sometimes overly projected reading of Schumann's Carnaval. Siheng Song (21, China) doesn't yet manage to translate his careful observance of local detail into a satisfying larger picture. And Iddo Bar-Shai (26, Israel) may have scuppered his chances by playing a long selection of Chopin mazurkas without seeming to have anything special to say about them.
Only three of the Irish test pieces were performed (Ian Wilson's was the one missed out), and the performances that made the strongest impressions were Andrey Ponochevny's of Philip Martin's In A Thousand Valleys Far And Wide and Antti Siirala's of Frank Corcoran's Sweeney's Total Rondo.
• The finals, which will be on Lyric FM and Network 2, are at the NCH on Thursday and Friday at 7.30 p.m.
By Michael Dervan
Galway Early Music Festival
Galway
Galway Early Music Festival continues to hold its head up. Despite occasional glitches of detail, this year's concerts, workshops and lectures made you feel as if you were still on the voyage of discovery that has driven the early-music movement for more than 100 years.
I missed the opening concert and the closing choral service, involving Galway Baroque Chamber Choir. Like all the main events, these embraced this year's theme, Contact: A Musical Journey From The Middle East To The New World.
Travel as adventure and as a source of suffering were reflected in a well-presented programme of crusading and troubadour songs, plus instrumental music, by the Dublin-based group Seanna. The harpist Andrew Lawrence-King built his late-night concert around music from 16th-century Spain. It was a gem, authentic in the widest sense and consistently persuasive, from the easy-listening music of court dances to the high-brow demands of the fantasia.
For the well-known ensemble Oni Wytars, panache and invention were far more important than historical authenticity. Their programme - five centuries of popular and art music from around the Mediterranean - was good fun, and their technical virtuosity was consistently impressive. Love it or hate it, this was a concert in which the style of the group seemed more important than the style of each piece.
The highlight of the weekend was a performance of the Spanish opera-ballet La Púrpura De La Rosa. In 1701, 20 years after the death of the librettist Calderón, his text was re-used in Lima, Peru, to celebrate Philip V's accession to the Spanish throne. The composer for that occasion, Tomás de Torrejón, was no Monteverdi or Purcell, but his simple sequences of strophic, dance-like arias, and of ground-bass instrumental forms, offer impeccable, fast-moving support for Calderón's wonderful verses.
Back-projection onto a screen provided surtitles and simple indications of a change of scenery. Costumes were sufficiently baroque. Singing and dancing were unaffected and natural. The group of about 17 student musicians played with confident security. And everything had the youthful zest that puts incidental problems in their place. For the young people involved and for the audience, this concert epitomised the festival at its best: achievement in the present and inspiration for the future.
By Martin Adams
