Hugh Tinney (piano), NSO/Alexander Anissimov NCH

{TABLE} The Rock............................ Rachmaninov Rhapsody on a theme of Paganini..... Rachmaninov Symphony No 2....................... Rachmaninov {/TABLE} RACHMANINOV's early orchestral work, The Rock, is doubly remarkable. The handling of the orchestra is remarkably assured for a composer who was only 20 - The Rock was his first published orchestral composition, though he had been composing for orchestra from his early teens.

And yet the piece is ultimately so dull that it is remarkable for it still to be heard in the concert hall at all.

It is featuring in the National Symphony Orchestra's current Irish Times tour under Alexander Anissimov, and the orchestra will be recording it for issue on the Naxos label.

Anissimov is a rewarding guide in Russian repertoire, and he was persuasive in the piece's stronger moments - an almost imperceptible start in the lower strings and a carefully-prepared major climax - though the persistent string figurations were sometimes allowed to mask more important material from the woodwind.

The rest of the programme was devoted to more familiar music

In the Rhapsody on a theme of Paganini Hugh Tinney was the thoughtful, playful, unsentimental soloist, easy in his give-and-take with the orchestra, holding one's attention less by the force of his presentation than through the sheer interest of it.

Paradoxically, it was only in the work's most famous moment, the 18th variation, that he failed to convince, when his eschewal of sentiment seemed to straitjacket the music into unwelcome stiffness.

Anissimov's musical responses in the Rhapsody were exemplary, but the lapses from the trumpet section were embarrassingly numerous.

Anissimov's Rachmaninov's Second Symphony with the NSO has already been heard from : spaciously-conceived, luxuriant without trespassing into over-lushness.

He has the knack of allowing the music to breathe with natural ease, and diminishes the potential risks of its recursiveness by always keeping an ear to the important shaping of longer spans.

The second time around, his reading felt both freer and looser, not so much of a gain in the opening movement but decidedly so (after an off-colour clarinet solo) in the slow expanses of the third.