Colman Pearce, composer

Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin

This concert featured music by Colman Pearce, the RTÉ conductor who has recently focused more on composition. It opened with the programme’s earliest work, settings from 1993 of poems by Micheal O’Siadhail for mezzo and piano, with American Lester Senter and Pearce himself respectively.

As with the 2005 Six Yeats Songs, sung here by soprano Virginia Kerr, Pearce's very personal response to the texts favours chords in the piano's deep register where, unfortunately, there was a tendency for too much pedal. This clouded the interesting things going on. Nor was either singer consistently clear.

There was no lack of clarity in pianist Anthony Byrne's sprightly account of a vigorous Toccata Festivafrom 2005, its rumbling energy recalling the finale of Ravel's Piano Concerto. Byrne also gave the 2000 Prelude – Ludus, neatly unified from unison opening through rich chordal treatments to a lively central passage and a meditative end.

There was a recitative-cum-sonata element in What’s in a Name for trumpet – John Walsh – and piano, and a light-hearted (though not lightly performed) mix of jig and hymn-style in an amalgam of traditional Irish blessings requested for a friend’s wedding.

Most successful on this occasion was the 10-minute, perhaps orchestrally conceived Solstices for two voices and small ensemble – just completed. Setting brief passages from sources including Sylvia Plath and Longfellow, Pearce establishes a searing winter cold with harmonics, plucked piano strings and noteless flute-blowing, followed by a warm, high-spirited welcome to the summer equinox, interwoven with the well-known English round, Sumer is a-cumin in.