The Bank of Ireland "Mostly Modern" series had a winning idea for last Thursday night's concert. The American guitarist David Starobin, with his compatriot and friend, the composer George Crumb, gave a concert in the bank's arts centre, and afterwards took part in an open forum chaired by the "Mostly Modern" director, Benjamin Dwyer.
The larger part of the concert was devoted to nine pieces written for Starobin by American and European composers. They were taken from a collection of dances which Starobin has assembled over many years and which now approaches 70 pieces.
Works based on historical models included the resourceful Introduction, Chaconne and Corrente by the British composer Colin Matthews, and a quirkily contrapuntal Forlane by the American David Liptak. Yet most of the pieces took a less generic approach to dance, and that included the fairly recent composition by Elliott Carter, Shard, which brims with rhythmic vigour and is astonishingly concentrated.
One can see why composers write for Storobin. He has a knack of seeming to get to the heart of each piece, and nowhere did this emerge more strongly than in his partnership with Crumb.
Each of the five movements in Munduscanis is a portrait of a dog which the Crumb family has owned. With the composer playing percussion in discourse with Starobin, moving from cymbals to drums, and dipping a gong in and out of a baby-bath full of water, the sight carried echoes of a Sixties "happening".
Yet the sound has a discipline and a cogent, witty purpose which belies that connotation. This composer knows how to make every event count.
At 70 years of age, Crumb has a wealth of experience, and in the forum he showed a pleasing readiness to share it without imposition. This was not a profound evening, but it was a memorable and warming one.