Philip Martin (piano)

Harmonious Blacksmith Variations - Handel/Martin

Fantasy in C, Op 17 - Schumann

Theme and Variations, Op 19 - Tchaikovsky

4 Preludes - Rachmaninov

Variations on Tabhair dom do lamh - Philip Martin

The RDS's short autumn recital series opened on Saturday with the first of two appearances by Dublin-born pianist and composer Philip Martin.

Martin, now in his early fifties, is probably the closest we have to a composer/pianist in the old style - he's written a lot for his own instrument, and he's not afraid to perform the most difficult of it himself.

In other repertoire, he's not the most style-sensitive of players. In spite of a great fleetness of finger, he's a heavy pedaller and often seems to enjoy the accumulation of sound that the sustaining pedal facilitates.

In musical terms this was as a real liability in Schumann's Fantasy - I can't recall hearing the opening attacked with such clamorous ferocity before - and it shifted Handel's Harmonious Blacksmith Variations resolutely out of the 18th century.

Stark tune-and-accompaniment style highlighting limited the sense of variation within Tchaikovsky's Variations, Op. 19 No. 6, though the same approach yielded far more appropriate results in four of the most popular of Rachmaninov's Preludes.

Martin's own Variations on Tabhair dom do lamh are cast in a sort of cabaret style, one where performer and music were, predictably, totally at one.