{TABLE} Ekagra.......................... Kazuo Fukushima Trois Pieces Pour Flute......... Ferroud Lost in Suite................... Paul Hayes Voice............................Takemitsu Six Preludes for Solo Piccolo... David Loeb Between Two Worlds ............. George Rochberg {/TABLE} THE Bank of Ireland "Mostly Modern" series began last Thursday with a lunchtime concert called "Oriental Wind", at the Bank of Ireland Arts Centre, Foster Place, Dublin. Susan Doyle (flutes) and Patrick Zuk (piano) produced some well characterised and technically solid playing of music either by Japanese composers, or by Westerners inspired by the Orient. Apart from Ferroud's Trois Pieces Pour Flute, which dates from 1921, all the music was less than 20 years old.

Musical styles fell into three categories. The most obvious modernism came from Takemitsu (Voice for solo flute) and Fukushima (Ekagra for alto flute and piano). Both are forcefully episodic and a-tonal, with progress defined by contrasts of material in a way which eschews Western notions of beginnings and endings.

A different type of modernity was shown by Paul Hayes's Lost in Suite for piano, which was receiving its first performance. Three short pieces evoke the experience of being lost in various laces. Perhaps the composer intended the abrupt contrasts between tonal progression and free dissonance to convey that experience. But I found that the pieces' brevity gave these contrasts little context, except in Lost in Tokyo, the least dissonant of the three.

Finally there was the chinoi-serie, or its general Oriental equivalent. The Ferroud and the Six Preludes for Solo Piccolo by the American composer David Loeb were in this category. So, to some extent, was Between Two Worlds by another American, George Rochberg. This is not a profound piece; but its muscular certainty made it the most engaging item on the programme.