Thérèse Fahy, piano

NCH, Kevin Barry Room, Dublin

Debussy – Études, Book II(exc).

Ed Bennett – Gothic.Jonathan Nangle – Grow Quiet Gradually. Ian Wilson – Station No 9.

Siobhán Cleary – Chaconne.

Kevin O'Connell – C éimeanna.Messiaen – Petites esquisses d'oiseaux(exc)

Should I have gone to Specsavers? A combination of dark ambient lighting and middle-aged eyesight meant I couldn’t read what the composers had written in the printed programme for pianist Thérèse Fahy’s solo recital featuring five Irish works composed between 2006 and 2008.

But perhaps it’s a more honest way to hear new or unfamiliar music, even if it feels like rock-climbing without a safety harness. It obliges you to listen with a completely open mind and a different kind of attention. Maybe it also obliges the piece, and the performer, to communicate clearly.

Which is what happened here. Fahy brought a lively animation to pieces that had visual connections, such as the child-like awe for big, insistent piano sounds in Ed Bennet's Gothic, inspired – as I read and appreciated afterwards – by Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris. Also bearing an ecclesiastical connection was No 9from Ian Wilson's Stations, which I already knew was a long work inspired by the stations of the cross.

It’s not intended as programme music, but Fahy fashioned a credible join between its rumbling, descending motif and the notion of Christ falling for the third time.

The other Irish pieces professed no extra-musical connection. Jonathan Nangle's Quiet Graduallywas delicate as crystal, meditating on soft, spectral clusters, and Siobhán Cleary's Chaconneborrowed an old baroque form and clothed it in contemporary colours.

Kevin O'Connell's Ceimeanna (Steps)brought vigour and challenge, more resistant to the listener's approach than the other pieces with its angry, post-tonal freedom and bursts of vehement counterpoint, culminating in a vivid dialogue between the top and bottom of the piano, neither end yielding.

Fahy seemed to relish the extra physical challenges of the O'Connell, even more so in her concluding sample from the strange sound-world of bird-calls in Messiaen's Petitesesquisses d'oiseaux – nicely book-ending a recital which she opened with extracts from Debussy's Études.