Hugh Tinney (piano)

NCH, Dublin

Bartók – Suite Op 14.

Raymond Deane – Noctuary (exc).

Chopin – Nocturne in D flat Op 27 No 2; Mazurkas in B Op 56 No 1 and in A minor Op 17 No 4;

Scherzo No 2. Liszt – Sonata in B minor

Hugh Tinney's European Piano Masterworks Series at the National Concert Hall is a series of three monthly concerts, each concert is built around a landmark work – Beethoven's Hammerklavier Sonata, Liszt's Sonata in B minor, and Ravel's Gaspard de la nuit– with the aim of "contextualising these peaks in programmes linked to them by style, period and provenance". And, for good measure, each recital also includes a pair of pieces from Noctuaries, a new work by Raymond Deane.

It would have been useful to have a fuller explanation of the rationale behind the choice of pieces. The Hammerklavier,completed in 1818 was contextualised not by anything from the early 19th century, but through pieces by Mozart and Haydn dating from 1778 and 1793.

Liszt's Sonata in B minor(1853), which is dedicated to Schumann, was presented in the company of four pieces written in the previous three decades by Chopin – why this particular four, it would have been interesting to know – and a decidedly un-Lisztian suite written in 1916 by Bartók, a composer who did actually write some works in Lisztian style in his youth.

Bartók may have been a modernist as a composer, but as a pianist he was an old-style romantic, even having a soft spot for the once widespread expressive effects to be wrought from the dribbling habit of playing the left hand a little before the right.

Tinney, by contrast, is a thoughtful, conscientious modernist who likes clean lines and clear rhythmic articulation. The effect was to make both the Bartók Suite, as well as the Chopin group which followed, sound a little too cool, and the mannered rubato in the Chopin (especially the on the beat hesitations in the D flat Nocturne) was anything but persuasive.

The best of the Chopin playing came in the mysteriously wilting chromaticism of the A minor Mazurka, a piece which, remarkably, was first sketched by the teenage composer a couple of years before Beethoven died.

Mystery wasn't a feature of the performance of Liszt's Sonata in Bminor which followed. The manner was rather one of a strangely dispassionate-seeming urgency, the delivery at times almost clipped, the noisy chordal climaxes sounding forced in the pursuit of a tonal grandeur which they never quite delivererd. It had all the signs of a performance that came more from the mind than the heart.

On the other hand, the introverted, at times impressionist calm of Deane's Duskissand the flickering movement of his Nachtfalterwith its moments of percussive intrusion – the titles mean twilight and moths – seemed perfectly judged.