Benedetti, Grynyuk

NCH, Dublin.

Brahms – Sonata in G Op 78. Beethoven – Sonata in C minor Op 30 No 2. Strauss – Sonata in E flat.

THE NATIONAL Concert Hall has dropped the word celebrity from its concert series and has merged the orchestral concerts and recitals into a single and somewhat curtailed series for the current season.

Scottish violinist Nicola Benedetti, who gave the first recital in what’s now branded as the “International Concert Series 2011-2012”, is certainly a celebrity. But her playing of sonatas by Brahms, Beethoven and Strauss with pianist Alexei Grynyuk on Tuesday had few of the vices that can hamper the music-making of the celebrity breed.

Her playing was low key, particularly in Brahms’s Sonata in G, Op 78, a work which one of the composer’s intimate friends described as “a piece of music entirely in elegy”.

Benedetti and Grynyuk played it with reserve and delicacy, showing an understanding that even in the very public space of a concert hall this is music which communicates best when it’s conveyed almost as a private statement.

They upped the temperature for the more agitated outer movements of Beethoven’s Sonata in C minor, Op 30 No 2, pulling back for the calm of the slow movement and the wit of the Scherzo.

Benedetti is not the biggest- sounding of violinists and the piano part of Richard Strauss’s youthful Sonata in E flat is often black and busy with notes. But Grynyuk showed something of the shape-changing adaptability portrayed in the movie, The Mask, dominating in brief bursts and spending a lot of the time filling out the filigree of background patterns.

The florid embroidery given to the piano at the heart of the improvisatory central movement is perhaps the sonata’s most striking passage.

Grynyuk played it in a way that was both specific and suggestive, and created an effect that was quite magical.

The duo rounded the evening off with an encore, the Meditation from Massenet’s Thaïs, Benedetti here luxuriating in a tone of melting allure.