96 String Along

{TABLE} Sonasa in D ..................... Locatelli Fantasy in F minor .............. Chopin Philip's Peace .................. Elaine Agnew Epitaph IV ...................... Martin Ellerby Fantasiestycke Op 73 ............ Schumann La maja y el ruisenor ........... Granados Carmen Fantasy .................. Buxton Orr {/TABLE} THE principal cellist of the Irish Chamber Orchestra, Richard Jenkinson, joined pianist Roy Holmes last week for the second of the National Concert Hall's oddly titled 96 String Along concerts.

Jenkinson, who pursues an independent solo career (he won third prize at the Vittorio Gui chamber music competition in Florence in 1994), is a graceful, nimble performer. The opening work, an arrangement by the 19th century Italian cellist Alfredo Piatti of some of Locatelli's works for violin, was notable for some delightfully agile playing, born of exceptionally fine bowing control.

The programme included two recent works for cello and piano. Elaine Agnew's insistent threnody, Philip's Peace, took first prize in the composition section of RTE's Musician of the Future Competition earlier this year. On repeated hearing it seems to make its musical point at too great a length.

Martin Ellerby's epitaph Lux Aeterna, inspired by the 1942 Nazi atrocities in the Czech village of Lidice (already well commemorated in music, most notably by Martinu), is even more recent than the Agnew. It was completed in April and approaches its subject in a manner more sentimental than elegiac.

Sadly, Jenkinson packed the rest of his programme with arrangements - a less than convincing raid on Schumann's Op. 73 (originally for clarinet and piano), a redundant bowdlerisation of Granados's Maiden and the Nightingale and an utterly meretricious recycling of tunes from Bizet's best loved opera by the Scotsman Buxton Orr.

Roy Holmes's single solo contribution, Chopin's Fantasy in F minor, offered music of altogether higher calibre, but his playing here, with no real warmth or amplitude, lacked the point of his contribution to the two contemporary pieces.