Suite in G - Rameau

Sonata in G Op 31 No 1 - Beethoven

Sonata in C Op 1 - Brahms

There is, these days, something of an aura about the name of the Russian pianist, Grigory Sokolov. And why wouldn't there be? After all, he had the distinction of taking the top prize at the Tchaikovsky Competition in 1966 at the age of 16. However, it's only fairly recently, after years of difficulties with Soviet bureaucracy, that his true status as one of the major pianists of the age has begun to emerge in this part of the world.

The programme for his NCH/The Irish Times Celebrity Concert on Sunday opened challengingly with a keyboard suite by Rameau, music which to our modern ears seems to belong to the specific sound world of the harpsichord.

Sokolov was unstinting in his observation of the music's rich embellishments, and showed musical and scholarly alertness to the style of rhythmic alteration known as "notes inegales". But it has to be said that, for all the care and attention, not to mention the subtlety of pianistic resource, the pieces tended to sound cluttered as they rarely would coming from the more clearly planar dynamic world of the harpsichord.

The G major Sonata from Beethoven's Op. 31 set, however, was a breathtaking achievement, miraculous in its acuteness of observation and precision of delivery. The unusual snap of the chordal dislocations (right-hand before left) in the opening movement was made to feel again a thing of wonder as astonishing as it must have been when newly composed. Sokolov managed to sustain the sense of relish in this gesture right through the movement.

There was, equally, a sense of freshness in his appreciation of harmonic movement in the music, which he managed to articulate with a particularly potent combination of novelty and inevitability. The slow movement, with its dryly plucked bass beneath a melody that's slow in pulse but sometimes florid, even gushing in detail, was remarkable for its poise and balance. The control of left-hand sonority here allowed a limpid clarity within dynamics fully as soft as Beethoven asks for.

And the closing Rondo, one of those awkward to pace Allegrettos, travelled with a firm trajectory that was never forced, projecting for the listener a sense of relaxation ideal for picking up on the composer's richly good-humoured wit.

The 20-year-old Brahms's high-spirited Op. 1 may be no match for the mature music of the Beethoven he adored, but Sokolov probed it with a rigour that unerringly found the magisterial quality in the opening Allegro, the folk-song affections of the second, rejoiced in the energy of the Scherzo, and never wavered in the helter-skelter of the demanding flying leaps in the finale. A memorable end to an evening of very special imaginative recreation.