Conor Biggs (baritone)/David Adams (piano)

Fanfare - Kevin O'Connell

Etude 2000 - Kevin O'Connell

O To Be A Dragon - Kevin O'Connell

The opening concert of the Bank of Ireland "Mostly Modern" series was dedicated by its participants to the memory of Brian Boydell, who died last week. In the bank's Arts Centre, featured composer Kevin O'Connell paid a heartfelt tribute to his former teacher. He and the performers, Conor Biggs and David Adams, had been classmates at TCD and graduated in 1982, the year Dr Boydell retired as professor of music.

By happy coincidence, the opening item was Fanfare, written in 1997 as an 80th-birthday present for Brian Boydell. Its concise thinking in just two printed pages reflects many of the musical values of its dedicatee.

David Adams gave a musicianly account of this work and of Etude 2000, commissioned as a test-piece by the Axa Dublin International Piano Competition but not chosen by any of the competitors. This first public performance revealed it as an idiomatic work, setting musical challenges that are perhaps not of the showy kind which tend to attract competitors.

Uncompromising, ideas-driven composition was even more evident in the song cycle O To Be A Dragon, which was written for these performers. The seven unconnected poems by the American, Marianne Moore (1887-1972), are packed with quicksilver imagery which would tempt any composer into profligacy.

O'Connell's rhetorical-declamatory vocal lines, with not one instance of word repetition, have that type of discipline so admired in Dowland, Purcell or Britten. The composer was inside the texts, as was Conor Biggs. Indeed, Biggs and David Adams were inside the music, one of the most striking vocal settings from any Irish composer in recent years.