{TABLE} Bagatelles Op 126........................................... Beethoven Sonata No 2 (1931 version) Rachmaninov Etudes Op 2.......... Chopin {/TABLE} IF AN award were announced tomorrow for the most-decorated Irish pianist under 21, Finghin Collins would be the clear winner. This young Dubliner worked his way successfully through what the Feis Ceoil has to offer, and has accumulated prizes at various other national competitions as well. He was successful in Germany at the Ettlingen International Competition for Young Pianists in 1992 and took the top prize in RTE's Musician of the Future Competition two years later.

He's been heard in professional company, too, from the time in 1991 when he shared the platform with John O'Connor and Philippe Cassard in Mozart's Concerto for three, pianos. He teamed up with Cassard again at the NCH in June, and, earlier in the year, was featured in John Finucane's clarinet series at IMMA.

At the end of his teens, he's now of an age where the international competition circuit is beckoning, most specifically and immediately the Leeds International Piano Competition, which starts later this week. The final weeks in the run-up to the competition have been focused on preparatory concerts, of which last night's Beethoven, Rachmaninov and Chopin programme at the Bank of Ireland Arts Centre was part.

The quieter moments of the opening set of late Beethoven Bagatelles, Op. 126, showed signs of a ruminativeness that I haven't often heard in this player's music-making in the past. For my taste, though, his concentration in these pieces is too much with what they grew out of as opposed to the yet-to-be-charted territories they foretell.

Rachmaninov's sprawling Second Sonata, by turns barnstorming and tender, is a major challenge of technique and style. The music's sheer abundance seemed to steer Collins towards a desire to contain it all, with results that at times somehow seemed more formal rather than big-hearted.

The 12 studies of Chopin's Op. 25 might seem an even more demanding undertaking, but their shorter spans encouraged more characterful solutions, although signs of fatigue were discernible in the whirlwind and storms of the final two. It was in the gentler core of No. 7 in C sharp minor, after the rapid scales had run their course, that Collins seemed to me to strike a note of individual tenderness which would make any competition jury sit up and take notice.