MARTIN ADAMSreviews Camerata Ireland/Douglas at the NCH, Dublin

Camerata Ireland/Douglas

NCH, Dublin

Mozart– Piano Concertos Nos 14 in E flat K449, 24 in C minor K491, 21 in C K467

For several years, Camerata Ireland and its artistic director Barry Douglas have been presenting piano concertos directed from the keyboard – a practice that can especially suit Mozart, who did it himself. For it to work, players have to be good listeners, and, on the evidence of this evening, when we heard three Mozart concertos, that is one of several areas in which Camerata Ireland’s music-making is increasingly impressive.

The concert’s second half featured John Brown, the flautist from Carrickfergus who has just won the Accenture/Camerata Ireland Young Musician of the Year 2009 award. With Douglas at the piano, Brown showed exactly why he had been chosen, by playing the last two movements of Prokofiev’s Flute Sonata.

Although Barry Douglas is a wizard at the keyboard, he is also a thoughtful and imaginative musician; and one did not always have to agree with everything in the concert to acknowledge that. For example, the Concerto in E flat K449 sometimes seemed a little too suave for the nature of its material; and the famous Concerto in C minor K491 had a brooding intensity that sometimes did not have the impact the more common stormy approach can deliver.

Nevertheless, there was something special about this evening’s music-making, and much of that depended on the enthusiastic rapport between Douglas and the orchestral players. Especially in the final work, the Concerto in C K467, rhythm was always lively, but it was also long-phrased – driven by metre at least as much as by pulse. This made the famous “Elvira Madigan” slow movement sing as if with just a couple of enormous breaths; and although the last movement zipped along at a ferocious speed, it never sounded rushed.