Rolf Hind

{TABLE} Swining Tripes and Trillibubkins; Things That Gain From Being painted; Triorchic Blues ............................... Gerald Barry Nigredo (1995) ................................ Simon Holt La Tranquet Rieur (1956-58) ................... Messiaen Piano Etrudes: 10, 11, 14, 12, 15 & 16 ........ Gyorgy Ligeti {/TABLE} ROLF HIND, in his piano recital of contemporary music in the Lane Gallery at noon last Sunday, generated an unusual amount of excitement, such was the vigour and intensity of his playing. He exploited the dynamic contrasts in the music in such a way that the listener was caught up in a dervish's dance of the subtler seductive powers of sound there was less trace.

He captured well the frenetic insistence of the three pieces by Gerald Barry, but the early Things That Gain From Being Painted (1977) has episodes of a greater lyricism than he managed to convey. Simon Holt's Nigredo is an expressionist piece in which composer and pianist bludgeon the listener into acceptance of a new world built from the distorted conventions of the old.

The older composers sound as advanced as their young successors. The piece from Messiaen's Catalogite D'oiseaux makes great play with the mocking calls and trills of the Traquet Rieur, creating a sophisticated cacophony of the forest. Ligeti's Etudes are as intellectually stimulating as the constructions of J.S. Bach and Rolf Hind communicated their extremes of calm and ferocity with the assurance of the ring master.