REVIEWS:NCH, Dublin

Beethoven– Spring Sonata. Janacek– Violin Sonata. Aulis Sallinen– Four Etudes. Strauss– Violin Sonata.

This celebrity violin and piano recital by Midori and Charles Abramovic was a virtuoso performance almost down to the last detail.

Violin virtuosos often favour pianists who have not only a high level of adaptable musicianship but also an unusual degree of accommodating athleticism. Casting the violin in the most favourable light is the name of the game. And it’s not unusual for the performances of the showpieces to outclass the delivery of the heavier fare from the standard repertoire which forms the bulk of the programme.

Midori has been before an international public since her sensational 1982 debut with the New York Philharmonic at the age of 11. She still plays with enviable ease, tasteful musicality, and a lightish, husky tone that can flick into an impressive overdrive at a moment’s notice.

Yet the three sonatas she offered here were all disappointing. Abramovic functioned mostly as a follower and supporter in music that calls for a full musical partnership, and Midori’s own playing had a coolness and sense of reserve that was rather too chilly.

Everything was elegantly turned in a minimalist kind of way, but only the central movement of Richard Strauss’s youthful Sonata in E flat, with its fantastically florid, improvisatory effects, came fully to life with a sense of engagement between the two players.

Better still, though, in a muted kind of way, were the Quatre étudesof 1970 by Finnish composer Aulis Sallinen, pieces in which the challenges are by no means all technical, and which, in these performances, often sounded more like quirky musings than clear statements.

For the two encores – Wieniawski's Souvenir de Moscouand Kreisler's Syncopation– the two players went into a new gear, and found a different kind of footings.

Here, at last, there was fire and heart and soul as well as the correctness which had kept so much of the evening on too even a keel.