Variations in F minor - Haydn

Etude in C minor, Op 10, No 12 (Revolutionary) - Chopin

Nocturne in C minor, Op 48, No 1 - Chopin

Sonata - Janacek

Along the Flaggy Shore - Philip Martin

Miroirs (exc) - Ravel

Vallee d'Obermann - Liszt

The 21-year-old Dublin pianist Isabelle O'Connell won the first Mabel Swainson Pianoforte Award at the 1998 Siemens Nixdorf Feis Ceoil and gave the recital which constitutes the most important part of her prize at the John Field Room on Tuesday.

With the assurance of youth, this final-year student at the RIAM's BA in Music Performance course embarked on a programme representing no less than six composers. This sort of challenge is one that most mature pianists avoid outside of special circumstances. It's also one that's likely to show up limitations of temperamental affinity and stylistic accommodation.

Liszt's Vallee d'Obermann, with its singing lines that need to be gently leant into, its sometimes ardent passages of recitative and its clamouring virtuosity, is a work that demands sophistication of ear, fine control of sonority and a rationing of climactic surges, as well as the depth of feeling with which Isabelle O'Connell essayed it.

Indeed, at various points in the evening, it was possible to deduce this young player's deepest intentions more accurately from her physical gestures than from the sounds she produced - what the hand painted didn't always match the sounds it shaped.

In Chopin's Revolutionary Study, she showed her raciest side (the C minor Nocturne listed and swelled too unevenly for its own good), and in the three movements from Ravel's Miroirs she found clearer routes between intention and delivery.

Young players' instincts often guide them more surely in the music of their own time than elsewhere. This is as it should be, and it's how it was in this recital, which included the premiere of Philip Martin's specially-commissioned Along the Flaggy Shore. Here, Isabelle O'Connell, playing with imaginative freedom, evocatively captured the composer's images of wind, sea, spray and stone, inspired by the Burren and Seamus Heaney's Post- script, and also spurred the audience to the most enthusiastic response of the evening.