New Ross Piano Festival

St Marys Church, New Ross

Last weekend's New Ross Piano Festival focused for the first time on music for two pianos. It also celebrated the bicentenary of the birth of Liszt, and presented the first work to be specially commissioned for the festival, Stephen Gardner's Two Guys walk into a Piano Bar.

Gardner's new piece came across as a moto perpetuowith strutting dialogues, chordal arguments and shaggy-dog-like digressions. Although the composer's own programme note introduces the idea of a "grand duel" (a reference to a passage of busy, chomping, discordance), the overall effect is actually rather good-natured, or at least that's how it sounded in the hands of Finghin Collins and Charles Owen.

And Gardner found a neat solution to the termination of his energetic machine, by having it run out of energy at the end, but not actually out of speed.

The two-piano repertoire is actually a rather perilous undertaking for performers, an undertaking in which failures of co-ordination are as easy to spot as are mis-matched angles or elevations in synchronised swimming.

The various pairings in New Ross, which included established two-piano teams as well as one-off duos for the festival, had their fair share of shuddering and clattering attacks, but the unanimity of spirit usually won out in the end. Katya Apekisheva and Charles Owen offered a clean, unexaggerated account of Mozart’s Adagio and Fugue in C minor, nicely free of the cliche of ear-tugging emphasis on the entries of the subject in the fugue.

Their account of Milhaud's spirited Scaramouche was light enough to let the music speak for itself, and their sizzling performance of Ravel's La Valse served to remind one of how much more music is to be found in the version for two pianos than in the often showily overplayed arrangement for two hands. They were less successful in Brahms's Haydn Variations, where an amount of over-generous pedalling caused unnecessary harmonic smearing.

Enrico Pace and Igor Roma made their first impressions in Ireland through the Dublin International Piano Competitions of 1991 and 1994 respectively, and played at the National Concert Hall as a duo in 2004.

They weren’t quite as impressive in New Ross as they had been in Dublin, with Roma’s tendency to be a heavy slugger unbalancing their work.

It was good, however, to hear them in Bartók’s Sonata for two pianos and percussion (with Roger Moffat and Richard O’Donnell), a seminal work that’s all too rarely heard in concert here.

And they provided the grandest of grand climaxes in the closing concert, through a frequently hysterical performance of Liszt’s already over-the-top Concerto pathétique.

The festival included other spectaculars, too, Stravinsky's piano duet arrangement of The Rite of Spring(ie, for four hands on one piano) spread for comfort over two keyboards by Apekisheva and Owen. Lutoslawski's playful Paganini Variations was the best offering from Noriko Ogawa and Kathryn Stott, who had earlier pounded their way through Rachmaninov's Suite No. 2 in a performance that quickly became aurally fatiguing.

There was also a performance of Schumann’s rarely-heard Andante and Variations, Op. 46, which is best- known as a piece for two pianos, but was originally written for two pianos, two cellos and horn (Pace and Roma with Aisling Drury-Byrne, Gerald Peregrine and Cormac Ó hAodáin). It’s a work full of gorgeous ideas, but it repeats itself so much in the matter of give and take that it becomes tiresome.

The festival also included a number of solo performances. Roma was disappointing because of the grotesque exaggerations of his selection of Liszt.

Pace showed dazzling style in Liszt's reworking of material from Mozart's Don Giovanni, but didn't quite live up to earlier performances he's given of this particular piece.

Finghin Collins took a pleasing middle road through Debussy's Images, Noriko Ogawa shone in Takemitsu's Messiaen homage, Rain Tree Sketch II, and young Irish pianist Fiachra Garvey, in the festival's only solo piano programme, showed lots of promise in works by Ravel, Barber, Chopin and Liszt.