Darragh Morgan

NCH Kevin Barry Room, Dublin

There was a strong feeling of throwback at the opening of violinist Darragh Morgan's recital presented by the Spatial Music Collective at the NCH Kevin Barry Room on Wednesday. It was an evening of music for violin and electronics, with an array of eight loudspeakers surrounding the audience. However, the strongest reference point for the opening piece, Adrian Moore's Fields of Darkness and Light(2010), seemed to be the romantic violin concerto – honeyed melodic writing with trills over sustained synthetic support, followed by various other touchstones of the genre.

Linda Buckley's exploring stars was the first of the evening's three premieres. The work was inspired by "the phenomenon of supernovae", and moved from lightly arpeggiated violin figuration into heavier areas, with a background that became positively threatening, before ending in suspended state.

Two of the pieces, Paul Wilson's Trapped in Ice(2007) and Jonathan Nangle's new where distant city lights flicker on half-frozen ponds, had chill-suggesting titles, and both offered effects that seemed rather too obvious, whistling or scraping sounds in a generally static setting.

Enda Bates's new Searching for Home played with a different set of expectations, seeking to project a specific musical presence without actually stating it.

The two most senior composers represented were Michael Alcorn, who'll turn 50 next year, and Simon Emmerson, who turned 60 last year. Alcorn's Crossing the Threshold (2001) sets the violin on a busily dissonant and jagged trajectory, competing with a kind of digitised spray of transformed and fragmented violin sounds. It was, in short, the evening's real virtuoso showpiece, and Morgan rose to its every challenge.

Emmerson's Stringscape(2010) is altogether milder in manner, judicious in its gauging of tension and resolution in the violin part, and meticulous in the texturing of the sometimes new-age sounding electronics. The only drawback was that the music seemed to have run its course some time before the piece actually stopped.