A flair for the contemporary

{TABLE} 4 Impromptus ............................ Chopin From the Crest of a Green wave ......... Jane O'Leary Iberia (exc) ............................ Albeniz Sonata in E flat Hob XVI: 38 ............ Haydn Miroirs (exc) ........................... Ravel Sonata No 2 ............................. Ginastera {/TABLE} THE Italian pianist Enrico Pompili became known to the Irish public through the 1994 Dublin International Piano Competition. He made it to the finals, where his final place (fifth) seemed undeservedly low, and he has since gone on to better things at competitions in Japan (taking second prize at Hamamatsu) and Spain (taking the Prize of Honour and the prize for contemporary music at the Paloma O'Shea in Santander).

In his programme for Music for Galway at UCG last night he played Jane O'Leary's From the Crest of a Green Wave with rhythmic assertiveness and a sensitive palette of layered colour, conveying the music with a cogency of line and richness of harmony which served as a reminder of his particular gift for the music of our own time (a gift which was rewarded in the Dublin competition for his playing of this particular piece).

He was impressive, too, in the angular, insistent, pounding writing of the Ginastera sonata, a primitivistic piece which carries obvious debts to both Bartok and Messiaen.

The major musical misjudgment was the Haydn sonata, over nuanced with the virtuosic preoccupations of a later age, and sadly out of control in the finale, one of those occasions the performer would surely wish to forget now rather than have had the eclipse of memory while actually onstage.

The two pieces from Albeniz's Iberia (El Puerto and El Albain) were idiomatically done, but the full resources of a concert grand would have been needed to do full justice to Pompili's - and Albeniz's conception.

Pompili sounded fully at home in the four Chopin impromptus (carried off at times with a real sense of poetry, and beautifully fluid, long breathed phrasing) and two finely gauged, atmospheric movements from Ravel's Miroirs (Oiseaux tristes and Une barque sur l'Ocean).