Parade of Irish piano pieces

{TABLE} Five inventions for Piano ............... Eric Sweeney Three Preludes for Piano ................ John Buckley Linos I/II .............................. Raymond Deane Dance for an Ancient Ritual ............. Brian Boydell Sleeping Leprechaun ..................... Brian Boydell Sarabande ............................... Brian Boydell Gleann Da Loch .......................... Rhona Clarke Three Piano Pieces ...................... Fergus Johnstone {TABLE} ANTHONY Byrne's lunchtime piano recital at the National Concert Hall's John Field Room last Friday had an enigmatic title - Contemporary Irish Piano Music New and Old. The composers ranged in age from their late seventies (Brian Boydell) to their late twenties (Rhona Clarke), and the music came from the 1950s to the present.

In a technically demanding programme, Anthony Byrne's looseness in rhythm and accuracy worked against strong definition. But he summoned panache where it was needed. His playing could be shapely, too, notably in Boydell's Dance jab an Ancient Ritual.

The programme offered a conspectus of age old issues especially relevant today. For Boydell, compositional technique is the means to realise the idea; and it is the idea, profound or not, which shapes the progress of the piece. In this respect he stood in stark contrast to Eric Sweeney and John Buckley. The former's loosely neo Classical Five Inventions for Piano (1983) and the latter's characteristically florid Three Preludes for Piano (1995) treat the idea and compositional technique as virtually synonymous.

Rhona Clarke's Gleann Da Loch shows a capacity to conceive a distinctive musical idea. But development is so closely linked with technical elaboration that the elaboration tends to blur the identity of the idea. Fergus Johnstone's 3 Piano Pieces neatly evades these issues through robust stylistic pilfering.

Some of the most forceful thinking emerged from Raymond Deane's Linas I/II, written in 1973, when the composer was just 20. The idea seems to be everything, as events unfold remorselessly.

Here, as in much of his music, Deane knows that there is a boundary between his ideas and his means.