French Suite No 5 - Bach
Sonata in C minor, Op 13 (Pathetique) - Beethoven
8 Lyric Pieces - Grieg
Prelude in C sharp minor, Op 45 - Chopin
Ballade No 3 - Chopin
Scherzo No 2 - Chopin
The Dublin pianist Neil Cooney probably achieved a career high in terms of profile in 1989, when he was the winner of the £15,000 Lombard and Ulster Music Foundation Award. Now aged 32, he's become increasingly active in concert in Ireland of late, and was heard in a full evening recital at the NCH John Field Room on Thursday.
The programme of Bach, Beethoven, Grieg and Chopin was what you would have to call middle-of-the-road, and in many ways that description could be applied to the playing, too.
Cooney makes a very agreeable sound, much mellower in character than is common among young pianists these days. But his Bach was flat and low in tension, both within and between the various melodic strands. He found rather more points to be made in Beethoven's Pathetique Sonata, with tempo-bending in the first movement's slow introduction that was sometimes quite extreme. Yet, however interesting the individual points may have been, the momentum between them - in other words, the view of the whole - was not always convincingly sustained.
The handling of the two bigger Chopin pieces, the Third Ballade and the Second Scherzo, showed something of the same characteristics, though the more ruminative C sharp minor Prelude was more successful.
However, it was the miniature world of Grieg's Lyric Pieces, high in contrast within as well as between pieces, in which Cooney seemed most clearly to have found his metier.
