Hugh Tinney (piano), RTE Vanbrugh Quartet

Donnacha Dennehy's new piano quintet, Pluck, Stroke and Hammer, premiered at the start of the Music Network tour by Hugh Tinney and the RTE Vanbrugh String Quartet on Sunday, is an essay in perpetual motion. Even the individual notes of trills and tremolos become part of an energetic dance in which the melodic material is dynamically sprayed into angular shapes with the precision of a computer-controlled scattergun.

The writing has something of the character of minimalism, but Dennehy's interest seems to be less in the textural delights of the moment than in the play of altogether longerarched paragraphs. The moments of major departure from established pattern are cunningly calculated, the single bar of silence breathtakingly effective, the cello's final slide into silence easily avoiding the gesture's potential for tired cliche.

Tinney and the Vanbrughs performed with distinction and the audience greeted the new piece with cheers of enthusiasm.

In Haydn's Rider Quartet, the Vanbrugh's playing sounded on this occasion a bit too beefed up (the over-emphasis of the first movement's persistent triplets was constantly jarring) and, contrariwise, Hugh Tinney approached Debussy's Children's Corner suite with a clear-headed classicism which sounded rather too severe. But everyone pulled strongly in the same direction to end the evening with a powerhouse performance of Brahms's great Piano Quintet.

The Music Network tour by Hugh Tinney and the Vanbrugh Quartet can be heard in Castlebar (tonight), Letter kenny (tomorrow), Longford (Saturday), New Ross (Sunday) and Tralee (Tuesday 2nd).