{TABLE} Piano Concerto No 2..................... Brahms The Love for Three Oranges Suite.........Prokofiev La valse................................ Ravel {/TABLE} THE conductor Colman Pearce has never been shy of fresh programme ideas. For the National Symphony Orchestra's first concert of 1997, given at the NCR last night, he abandoned the familiar formula of overture, concerto and symphony, for a sequence which followed that most monumental of 19th-century piano concertos, Brahms's Second, with two very different orchestral excursions from 1919, the suite from Prokofiev's opera, The Love for Three Oranges, and Ravel's sensually indulgent La valse.
The soloist in the Brahms was American pianist David Golub. In spite of some flailing-arm histrionics, Golub's keyboard mastery was impressive, and one of the pleasures of this performance was the consistent cleanness of detail secured by the soloist. However, his impassioned playing at the heart of the slow movement did not meet a sympathetic response from the conductor, and earlier in the piece there were distortions of rubato which seemed to sap too much of the tension out of the music. It was in the lighter mood of the finale that the pianist served the music best.
Colman Pearce delivered straightish readings of the Prokofiev and Ravel in the second half, the former with its grotesque elements underplayed in favour of tunefulness, the latter a little short on sophistication. But neither piece is by any means over-represented in Dubliners' concert diet, so their inclusion here felt particularly welcome.
