Max Levinson (piano)

The odds were rather tilted against Max Levinson at Powerscourt House on Wednesday, when the first US winner of the Guardian Dublin International Piano Competition gave a recital for the Music Festival in Great Irish Houses. His chosen repertoire was all of big, sonically demanding music. The small grand piano he was provided with, a Steinway, sounded simply dessicated at the bottom end under the heavy probing called for by both Bartok's Out of Doors and Ravel's Gaspard de la nuit. And he's a colourist, so the size of the piano limited his resources in this regard. Levinson made a good impression in Bartok during the competition itself. Since then, his Bartok playing has seemed less precise, sometimes blurrily impressionistic when it needs to be sharply etched, but effective, as always, in the evocative Night Music of this particular suite.

I don't know that Levinson has ever shown the sheer technical mastery that is a sine qua non for a first-rate performance of Ravel's taxing Gaspard de la nuit. He seems a fundamentally linear player - fond of emphasising melodic lines and shaping them with little agogic hesitations - and the expression of what Ravel called his "romantic poems of transcendental virtuosity" is as much a matter of harmony as of line.

Schumann's Kreisleriana invites polarisation, rashness on the one hand, and a resonant calm on the other. Levinson relates most clearly to the former, and teases the ear with nudging rubato in the latter. It's a not uncommon approach to Schumann's ETA Hoffmann-inspired fantasies, but it does rather limit their depth and range.