THERE was plenty of variety in last Wednesday's recital in NCH John Field Room with works for two violins and piano by Purcell, Moszkowski, Milhaud and Richard B. Evans, a contemporary American composer, and works for two violins alone by Hayden and John Kinsella.
Kinsella's Sonata for Two Violins was commissioned by the duo of Geraldine O'Grady and Oonagh Keogh and completed in May of this year. It was played with rapt concentration and proved to be most attractive. The slow first movement had passages of flowing polyphony with something of the coolness and clarity one associates with Palestrina and a not unpleasant suggestion of Irish melodic phases. The quick second, movement was full of the spirit of the dance with, again, a flavour of the native tradition.
How subtle that flavour was compared with the lushness of Evan's Celtic Air, arranged for the duo and first performed in
March, 1996. It awoke memories of the worst excesses of the school of patriotic arrangers.
Of the other works for two violins, and piano the most rewarding was Purcell's Golden Sonata, through a greater sense of period style would have been welcome. The duo and Anthony Byrne (piano) played Moszkowski's Suite Op 71 with suitable bravura, but in the field of superior salon music Milhaud's Sonata for Two Violins and Piano was to be preferred.
Haydn's Sonata in D, Op 102, for Two Violins gave as much pleasure as the Purcell the two composers have appreciated each other's use of standard forms.
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