One of a rare breed

THE general consensus among people I spoke to after the first night of the finals of the Guardian Dublin international Piano Competition was that the winner had not yet been heard.

The first of Wednesday's three players was Max Levinson, who gave a rather wilting and under powered account of Rachmaninov's Second Concerto. There's no lack of individuality in this American's playing, but his thoughtful and sensitive inclinations in this work frankly made him hard to hear a lot of the time, and same of his mannerisms - fading at the apex of a phrase, for instance - seemed to me to be musically debilitating.

There was a stronger sense of fibre and a greater ease of projection in Georgian Elisso Bolkvadze's handling of Tchaikovsky's First Piano Concerto, as well as a simpler and mare immediately communicative sense of warmth. Not everything here went smoothly (nor did it for Levinson, particularly in the Finale), but there was a lot to enjoy.

Switzerland's Adrian Oetiker played Brahms's First Piano Concerto securely, conscientiously. But, in spite of a few moments of genuine tenderness, the playing didn't often elevate itself out of the category of honourably dull. The partnership provided by the NSO under Robert Houlihan was, as throughout the finals, sensitive and accommodating.

The first of Thursday's players was the Japanese Seika Tstikamoto, who was heard in Prokofiev's Third Concerto. She had vivacity and tenacity and the technical resources to face into the composer's motarically driven keyboard writing with an unusual sense of equipaise. But the musical characterisation remained narrow and the piece's wit, sparkle and sentiment never fully came into focus.

Italian Massimiliano Ferrati's choice of Chopin's First Piano Concerto seemed a dangerous one as this is a piece which can easily sound sprawling and repetitive. His was a caring performance, cultured in tone, convincing in its sense of musical probity, but lacking in momentum so that, however much there was to enjoy moment by moment, the whole came to feel a less than folly satisfactory sum of the many rewarding parts.

It was the final contestant, Italian Corrado Rallero, who, in Brahms's Second Concerto showed a clarity of thought, directness of musical grasp and readiness of finger which allowed one to forget about the playing as such and simply relish the music as it flawed out.

Looking back over the previous rounds, the quite distinctive results of Rollero's engagement with disparate musical styles Schumann's F sharp minor Sonata (Round 1), Schubert's late Sonata in B flat (Round 2), and Beethoven's Diabelli Variations (semifinals) marked him out clearly for me as the most interesting and rewarding musician to have survived as far as the finals.

Taking everything into account, my ranking of the six finalists would have been Rallero, Ferrati, Bolkvadze, Oetiker, Levinsan, Tsukamoto (though, of course, these were by no means the players I would personally have chosen far the finals in the first place). The jury saw things otherwise and, having awarded prizes to Rollera for his Schubert sonata, for his semifinal recital, and two for his Brahms Concerto, put Levinsan first.

In doing so, they've certainly chosen a player with a clearly defined personality and temperament, one of a rare breed who is happy to indulge his inclinations towards dreamy intraversian, and who, in some of the earlier rounds, sought to balance them with some assertive pyrotechnics. The rest of the jury's ranking ran? Bolkvadze, Oetiker, Ferrati and Tsukamoto.