Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue - Bach
Piano Pieces, Op 119 - Brahms
Ballade No 4 - Chopin
Sonata in B flat, D960 - Schubert
The Limerick Music Association has long been using the Jean Monnet Theatre in the University of Limerick as its home base. Yet, although I've attended a number of LMA events in Limerick over the years, until last Saturday I had never actually happened on one in the venue most often in use.
The Jean Monnet is a modern lecture theatre with a shellshaped floor plan. It's airier of ambience and less cramped of acoustic than either TCD's Edmund Burke Theatre or DCU's Larkin Theatre, two comparable spaces in Dublin that come in for use as musical venues. It's more comfortable, too, and seemed well matched to the slightly dried-out sound of the LMA's mature Steinway concert grand, which doesn't proffer the temptations of glitter and brilliance of the much younger Steinways which are most frequently heard in concert in Dublin.
On Saturday, the piano was in the hands of Finghin Collins, at 20, maybe half the age of the instrument itself. Whatever the relationship of years, the musical connection proved to be a good one. Collins set a steady, clear-headed course through Bach's Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue, the fugue carefully layered, though not in a way that was high in contrapuntal tension. He seemed more challenged by Chopin's Fourth Ballade (where he created too strong a sense of six-in-a-bar rather than the desired slow two) than by the four pieces of Brahms's Op. 119, where the technical demands of the closing Rhapsody were finely squared up to.
But the greatest interest in the programme was the single work of the second half, a fairly recent venture into late Schubert through the Sonata in B flat, D960. While neither of the first two movements essayed the realms of expansiveness favoured by many a more seasoned player, the music did elicit a consistency of cultured gentleness that is new to Collins's musical character. The Scherzo was attractively fleet and the finale (with good recovery from a potentially damaging dislocation) was driven with clarity and firmness.
