Quartet in B flat K589 - Mozart
Quartet in F Op 96 (American) - Dvorak
Nocturnes Op 55 - Chopin
Piano Quintet - Schumann
What price success? It has to say something about the state of our musical institutions that Finghin Collins's victory at the Clara Haskil International Piano Competition last September doesn't seem to have brought him a single extra, major engagement in his native city. Until last Friday, that is, when the Limerick Music Association presented him in partnership with the Skampa String Quartet from Prague.
His handling of the two highly-contrasted Nocturnes of Chopin's Op. 55 was carefully reined-in, as if he were in some way trying to keep the natural ardency of his playing in check. The results were not entirely successful, the music's poetry, which is expressed with particular linear complexity in the second of the set, emerging, unusually, in a style of plain prose.
His natural exuberance found much freer play in the Piano Quintet of Schumann, the first of its kind (for piano and string quartet) to have been left by a great composer. The main auditorium of the NCH is not the most sympathetic venue for chamber music and Collins's enthusiasm for his task did on occasion cause the piano to dominate the strings excessively.
The first half of the programme was given over to string quartets, with the Skampa clearly negating the notion that national differences and idiosyncrasies have been ironed out of music-making in the modern world.
Their Mozart sounded much as it might from any number of quartets. Their Dvorak was altogether different, the interplay between the four instruments at once more alert and more conversational, and full of the sort of telling, imaginative touches that only Czech groups seem to know how to bring to this music. It's a measure of the Skampa's achievement that, in their hands, the American, one of the most over-exposed of quartets, turned out to be the real treat of the evening.
