Piffling - Donnacha Dennehy Premiere rapsodie - Debussy Three Pieces for Solo Clarinet - Stravinsky Sonata in E flat, Op 120, No 2 - Brahms The lunchtime concert on Wednesday at the Bank of Ireland's Arts Centre, Foster Place, Dublin, was given by the Irish clarinettist Carol McGonnell and the Russian pianist Alexandra Lubchansky. Both are studying in Frankfurt, McGonnell having moved there after considerable successes at home, as a composer as well as a clarinettist.
Assurance in technique and musicianship was one of the recital's main pleasures. Debussy's Premiere Rapsodie and Brahms's Sonata in E flat, Op. 120, No. 2, are demanding, profound, top-quality pieces. They were not sold short by these players, who had the air of experienced chamber musicians. The contrasts within each movement of the Brahms were emphasised by large shifts of tone and tempo. I found some of the latter extreme and disjunctive, yet both pieces had absorbing authority and pliant strength in rhythm and melody.
Carol McGonnell played two solos - Stravinsky's Three Pieces for Solo Clarinet and Donnacha Dennehy's Piffling. The latter, written in 1991 and receiving its first performance, is an unpretentious, single-idea piece: three minutes of mechanistic elaborations around a moto-perpetuo rhythm and quasi-modal melody.
Occasional losses of clarinet tone - reed problems perhaps? - were especially obvious in these pieces and stood out largely because of the rarity of blemish in this enjoyable recital.