Making the links with lots of spirit

{TABLE} Flying Dutchman Overture ............ Wagner Piano Concerto No 2 ................. Liszt Symphony No 4 (Romantic) ............ Bruckner {/TABLE} THE second of the National Symphony Orchestra's three Bruckner centenary concerts was conducted at the National Concert Hall last night by Robert Houlihan.

His conception of Bruckner's altogether more rounded than that revealed last week by Kasper de Roo.

In Bruckner's Fourth Houlihan was at once expansive - this had more to do with dynamics than tempo - and concise. The linkages from phrase to phrase were taut and the music's building blocks seemed to fall naturally into larger organic patterns.

Particularly different was the playing of the strings. With Clodagh Vedres at their head (rather than the leader, Alan Smale), they played with a warmth and lustre that was sadly lacking just a week earlier.

Under Houlihan, too, the string entries materialised with appropriate roundness rather than the almost anti Brucknerian sharpness which had been favoured by de Roo in the Seventh Symphony.

Overall, however, the playing was a bit more accident prone than in the first of the Bruckner concerts, but this seemed a small price to pay for the enormous increase in Brucknerian spirit.

The concert opened with a stormy account of Wagner's Flying Dutchman Overture and the popular soloist in Liszt's Second Piano Concerto was Armen Babakhanian, winner of the concerto prize at the last Dublin International Piano Competition.

Babakhanian's was a measured approach and he was rewardingly sensitive in his interplay with the many orchestral solos in this, the less flamboyant of Liszt's concertos. The feeling of rapport between orchestra and soloist was strong, and constituted one of the major pleasures of this performance.