{TABLE} Trio 1: Quasi una fantasia............ Benjamin Dwyer Vox in Rama........................... Poul Ruders Contrasts............................. Bartok {/TABLE} LAST Thursday's lunchtime concert in the Bank of Ireland Mostly Modem series at the bank's arts centre in Foster Place, Dublin, was called Contrasts. The name comes from Bartok's Contrasts for violin, clarinet and piano, which was the last item on the programme. It was therefore unfortunate that this classic of 20th-century chamber music received the least persuasive performance of the concert, which was given by Paul Roe (clarinet), Brona Fitzgerald (violin) and Dearbhla Brosnan (piano).
Contrasts was written fori Benny Goodman, and its intense combination of dance rhythms and thematic concentration needs a more emphatic approach than was evident on this occasion. The players were up to the music's considerable technical demands, but the discourse between them, implicit in the title, was dead-pan and rhythmically inert.
The performances of the two recent pieces on the programme, both for that same combination of instruments, were far more gripping. Vox in Rama, by the Danish composer Poul Ruders, features brittle rhythms and jagged lines with which the instruments work sometimes with each other, sometimes against. The playing was confident, with a pleasing brio.
The concert opened with Trio 1: Quasi una fantasia, by the director of this concert series, Benjamin Dwyer. In this piece, and in others, Dwyer uses quasi-tonal material without lapsing into banal pastiche, and his music often has a rhythmic drive which seems to emerge naturally from the material.
Trio 1 is not a profound piece, but it is engaging and, apart from a final section where the end is a long time coming, it is impeccably proportioned. Simplicity of idea is a strength, for the material is both distinctive and neatly sustained.