Energy and aplomb without clarity

Variations on an original theme Op 21 No 1 - Brahms

Dance Suite - Bartok

Six little pieces Op 19 - Schoenberg

Sonata in B minor - Liszt

Max Levinson, winner of last year's Guardian Dublin International Piano Competition, returned to Ireland for a concert at the Killaloe Festival on Friday. His programme added just a single work, Bartok's Dance Suite, to the repertoire listeners might have heard him in before, either in performance in Ireland or on his first CD. The suite was commissioned along with works by Kodaly (Psalmus Hungaricus) and Dohnanyi (Festival Overture) to celebrate in 1923 the 50th anniversary of the merging of Buda and Pest to form Budapest. In its original orchestral form it became one of Bartok's earliest international successes, though the piano transcription the composer made in 1925 has never gained wide currency. Levinson handled the dances with colouristic aplomb and abundant rhythmic energy, though not everything came across clearly in the busiest passages of what the composer fondly described as "imaginary folk music".

Levinson's tendency to overstretch his means of delivery was even more pronounced in his handling of Liszt's B minor Sonata. With the alacrity of a greyhound out of the trap, he raced at most of the work's more overtly pianistic challenges, and took the repose of the more intimate pages with dreamy slackness. In spite of the excitement of its dangerous moments, it's not an approach that managed to convey the piece as a convincing whole.

The finely-balanced expressionist explorations of Schoenberg's Six Little Piano Pieces, Op. 19, might have been expected to respond well to a player with Levinson's clear facility in tonal layering. He seemed, however, more concerned to inject these miniatures with momentary flightiness than to capture the fluctuating tensions which can make them so interesting.

The narrow focus of his linear concerns offered less than the whole story of Brahms's Variations on an original theme, Op. 21 No 1. But it was these variations which, on this occasion, provided the most viable vehicle for his clearly sculpted part playing and refined ear for piano sonority.