3 Chorale Preludes - Bach/Busoni

Sonata in A Op 101 - Beethoven

Reflection II - John Kinsella

Intermezzi Op 117 - Brahms

Sonata No 7 - Prokofiev

This year's National Concert Hall Debut Recital was given on Wednesday by Ireland's best-known young pianist, Finghin Collins. At 21, this spirited player has scooped most of the Irish prizes and awards open to him and he's had considerable success abroad to boot.

As a concert artist, his programmes have often had less the feeling of thoughtful construction than the appearance of a choice of pieces safely under his belt and in need of the proving ground of a public recital.

Wednesday's offering, with the interval placed after the Beethoven, was better balanced than most. And the evening also revealed a continuing process of intelligence reiningin a temperament tempted by the excitement of playing loud and fast.

Of the three Bach/Busoni chorale preludes, the first two slow ones, carefully layered, the chorales firmly and brightly projected, worked better than the moto perpetuo of Nun freut euch, where the evenness that Busoni requests was sacrificed to speed.

Indeed, temptations to speed were not entirely ignored in either the outer movements of Prokofiev's Seventh Sonata or the Finale of Beethoven's Op 101.

Both the opening movement of the Beethoven and the brassy march which follows it were delivered with a sense of greater restraint and control, and sounded all the better for it.

Late Brahms is not favoured territory for young performers these days. Collins seems adventurously to be set on working his way through. In the Intermezzi, Op 117, he sounded less interested in the serenity through which the great masters voice the spirit of these pieces than in a young man's questing for more immediately yielding detail.

Irish music, usually by representatives of the senior generation, retains a modest presence in Collins's work.