Irish Timesreviewers check out Philip Martinat the Boyne Arts Festival and John Shuttleworthat the Bud Light Revue, Dublin

Philip Martin (piano), Boyle Arts Festival

Herz- Theme and Variations Op 81. Liszt- Three Petrarch Sonnets. Philip Martin- In a Thousand Valleys Far and Wide. Three Jazz Pieces. Beethoven- Sonata in A Op 101. Gottschalk- Melody. Romance. Solitude. The Banjo

Philip Martin's 60th birthday concert at Boyle Arts Festival offered a style of programming that's unique among Irish pianists. For a start, most pianists don't double up as composers, so they can't programme works of their own. And there's no other Irish player I can think of who would offer music by the likes of Henri Herz (1803-88), purveyor of fantasias and variations that delighted the taste of 19th-century Paris, or Louis Moreau Gottschalk (1829-69), who was dubbed "the Chopin of the Creoles". Martin has recorded the complete solo piano music of Gottschalk for Hyperion, and a disc of Herz is on the way.

For the listener, though certainly not always for the player, Herz and Gottschalk are at the lighter end of things. Herz's variations are as free with notes as a 2007 summer downpour with raindrops, and Gottschalk's famously cheeky The Banjotakes the implications of its strumming style so straight and so far it's simply impossible not to smile along.

Neither composer was prone to let any development or complexity of harmony get in the way of immediate melodic expression. There's no need to delve far beneath the surface of their work. Martin showed both the fingers to deal with the torrents of notes and the temperament to highlight what's most immediately agreeable in the music.

The pieces of his own that he chose for Sunday's recital showed inclinations not dissimilar to Herz and Gottschalk. There was the highlighting of pianistic display in In a Thousand Valleys Far and Wide, which was commissioned as a test piece for the 2004 Axa Dublin International Piano Competition. And the Three Jazz Pieces (Rock, Blues and Boogie-Woogie)are like a 21st-century re-incarnation of the kind of spirit that motivated Gottschalk's The Banjo. Particularly impressive here was Martin's fearless handling of the technical challenges of In a Thousand Valleys Far and Wideand his open-hearted delivery of its lyricism.

Late Beethoven is not what you would call his natural territory, and his highly personal approach to the late Sonata in A, Op 101, marked it out as the evening's major oddity, a work where the musical approach seemed to work against rather than with the music.

The surges of Liszt's Petrarch Sonnets, ardent and urgent, were an altogether more apt vehicle for his romantically-oriented talent. Michael Dervan

John Shuttleworth Bud Light Revue, Dublin

How does someone such as John Shuttleworth, a befuddled family man from Sheffield with a rake of puns and a Yamaha keyboard that are both well past their use-by date, land a gig at a hip new comedy festival? The answer, to anyone familiar with the comic creation of Graham Fellows, should be obvious: Shuttleworth, the easily perturbed and largely oblivious amateur performer, is a deadpan comic feint. The joke isn't meant to be funny, which, through the necessary doublethink of ironic comedy, makes the joke funny. Get it? This makes Shuttleworth easily the most tiresomely traditional comedian at the Bud Light Revue, spinning out songs on his keyboard's pre-set rhythms, while it makes Fellows - hidden somewhere deep behind the screwed up squint of the character - the festival's most head-spinning subversive.

It's a curious position for a comic to be in, performing in the heart of the almost secret beauty that is the Iveagh Gardens, which, for the weekend, has also been cunningly disguised beneath a flooring of protective white plastic and colourless tents. A comedy audience is an attractive proposition for a sponsor, glamorous and monied enough to float from gig to gig, and young enough not to have fixed on the brand of beer they are content to die with.

But what do they make of Shuttleworth's show, With My Condiments, a quiet little affair based on his relationship to sturdy British cuisine which features more puns than a dozen newspaper reviews? "I don't like jazz," comes his dyspeptic complaint when the keyboard launches into a synthetic rhumba, "too many notes and not in the right order." Likewise his routine is the most painstakingly shambolic performance since Steve Martin's pretence of virtuoso incompetence in the 1970s. Singing jolly little songs about indigestion ( Tummy Trouble) or his very funny crusade against a certain confectionary ( Mutiny on the Bounty), Shuttleworth is such a deep immersion character that not everyone appears to be in on the joke.

There are great moments and some genuine ingenuity invested in his songs - a mithered, faux Westlife ballad is considerably better than any assured, genuine Westlife ballad - but my laughs were guarded, my amusement always suspicious. Can character-based stand-up be too ironic for it's own good? Peter Crawley