Talking about the all-Irish programme he's playing at the John Field Room tomorrow afternoon, pianist Anthony Byrne expresses a certain surprise at the adjective which crops up most frequently -- "romantic". He selected the pieces on the basis of promises he'd made to composers, pieces that had been written for him, and a trawl through the archive of the Contemporary Music Centre -- his pet hate, he says, is the fact that composers leave scores with marks which are illegible, and therefore can't be considered for performance.
Although offering the view that the work of Irish composers is "old-fashioned" ("about 10 years behind the times" is how he puts it, naming John Buckley as one of a number of exceptions), his own taste seems to be for music that's not going to challenge an audience too much. Terms of approbation which recur in our conversation include "nice", "pleasant", "melodic".
The work he speaks of with greatest enthusiasm is not actually by someone who's got a major profile as a composer. Conductor Colman Pearce's Game was written for Byrne, who demurred at the offer of a toccata, and asked instead for "a nice nocturne, or something gentle". What he's got is something which rings the changes, "a very enjoyable work to play, very pianistic, exceptionally well-written for the piano. It's very melodic, very harmonic, a very compact and dynamic piece. It's really very, very good."
For Byrne as performer, the most challenging work is Eibhlis Farrell's Time Drops, which he says is also "probably the most conventionally contemporary, as people understand contemporary music to be". It's very atmospheric (with the sort of under-the-lid work he doesn't like, of plucking the strings directly) and with its wide range of sonority and colour he expects it to be "a very exciting piece" if it comes off as he wants it to. "I've worked very hard with this, I found it very difficult. That's the truth. I think I'm just about cracking it, now."
John Kinsella's Reflection, Marian Ingoldsby's Undulations, John Gibson's Slow Dance in 3 and 4 and Toccata, all fall under the romantic banner. The other pieces are Philip Flood's December Preludes ("minimalism with interesting characteristics"), Bernard Geary's Two Cameos (which Byrne performed at an all-Geary concert last year), Philip Martin's Soundings ("a lovely work, very descriptive, very nice, yet unusual for Philip, not his normal music"), and the early Toccata by Eric Sweeney, written in 1966 when the composer was just 18. All in all, then, one man's view of some of the gentler slopes of the landscape of contemporary Irish piano music.
Anthony Byrne plays his IMRO-sponsored programme of Irish piano music at the NCH John Field Room tomorrow at 3.15 p.m. The recital is being recorded for future broadcast by RTE FM3 Classical Radio.
