Guardian Dublin

IT was a long weekend at the RDS as 54 pianists went through their paces in the first round of the Guardian Dublin International Piano Competition. For each individual player the task is to use a 30 minute recital of freely chosen repertoire to swing the jury towards selecting them for a further hearing as one of the 24 players taken into the second round.

This year, for the first time, I managed to hear every single one of the first round players. The overall impression I left with was of a steadying of standards, a positive development in that what you might call the duds were fewer, a negative one in that at the highest levels of pianism and artistry the competition was not as strong it has been in the past.

The first round is the one which sees the sharpest cull. From my personal shortlist of 24, I was sorry to see that the jury had not been swayed by the Israeli Shay Cohen's civilised, anti thunder reading of Liszt's Ballade No. 2, Italian Roberto Poli's keenly observed and subtly weighted Prokofiev (the Sixth Sonata) or Ukrainian Alexander Ivanov, whose sophisticated pianism couldn't quite mask a stasis which undermined his handling of the Bach/Busoni Chaconne, but whose magisterial Shostakovich (the last of the Op. 87 Preludes and Fugues) whetted the appetite for more.

Two Irish players have made the first cut, Maria McGarry, who was surely carried through on the spine tingling sense of rapture she breathes in Messiaen's Le baiser de l'enfant Jesus, and Finghin Collins, whose Bach was more specifically impressive than his Rachmaninov.

Among the rest (and leaving aside a handful of successful players whose claim to attention may rest on the rapidity or loudness of their delivery), I find myself particularly looking forward to second encounters with a mixed international group of three Italians (Massimiliano Ferrati, Carlo Guaitoli, Corrado Rollero), one Japanese (Naoya Seino), one Greek/Russian (Katia Skanavi), and one American (Max Levinson), though the music they made their best impression in was, with the exception of Bartok, from the Austrian and German tradition, Schubert, Brahms, Mendelssohn, Schumann and Reger. The second round of the competition takes place at the RDS on Wednesday and Thursday.