Collins, RTÉ NSO/Mandeal

NCH, Dublin

Brahms

– Piano Concerto No 2.

Prokofiev

– Symphony No 5.

RTÉ Symphony Orchestra had all the advance appearance of a concert that was jinxed. At the end of last month, the original conductor, Carlos Kalmar, withdrew and was replaced by Cristian Mandeal. And the current volcanic ash travel crisis knocked out the advertised soloist, Boris Berezovsky.

The programme went ahead unchanged, with Finghin Collins stepping into the breach. It’s no tall order to take on Brahms’s Second Piano Concerto at short notice, although Collins did have the advantage of having played the piece at the end of February, with the Ulster Orchestra in Belfast.

In the event, there was not a hint of the behind-the-scenes disruption in the actual music-making. Collins is a player of unusual sang-froid. He doesn’t usually flinch under pressure, and even the exceptional demands of Brahms’s Second Concerto didn’t appear to faze him.

Collins delivered the grandeur and warmth of the first and third movements, the grit of the second and the graceful lightness of the finale as if it were all second nature to him. And Mandeal wove the orchestral texture around and underneath him with perceptive skill.

Prokofiev’s Fifth Symphony is a wartime work. Its première in January 1945 was interrupted when, with Prokofiev on the podium ready to conduct, artillery was fired to celebrate the crossing of the Vistula by the Red Army.

It’s not hard to imagine the extra frisson this brought to work, which has a kind of epic gravity in the first and third movements, giddy celebration in the second, and sunburst smiles in the finale.

Mandeal’s approach to the music was that of a muscular athlete. The playing was lithe and strong, and full of minute adjustments that might have seemed fussy were they not brought off with such flexibility.