Reviewed: Jean-Yves Thibaudet (piano)

NCH, Dublin

Debussy - Preludes Book 2. Brahms - Sonata in F minor, Op 5.

Pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet was born in Lyon to a French father and a German mother, and this recital divided neatly to match the two strands of his lineage. Given the strength of his public identification with French repertoire, the results were a little surprising. Thibaudet's playing of the second book of Debussy's Preludes was sculpted with meticulous care. You would never know from these performances that the Preludes were the work of a composer who had wanted the piano to sound as if it were "an instrument without hammers" or that he liked the muted effect of playing pianos with their lids closed.

Thibaudet's Debussy was a man who etched with the finest of points, who maintained clarity at all costs, who preferred directness of statement to any kind of suggestiveness.

The playing itself was a thing to marvel at for its almost surgical precision, its avoidance of woolliness, its consistency of perspective. But at the same time it somehow confined the music.

Through its very explicitness it seemed to be trying to say everything in an area of repertoire that needs to communicate also those things that simply cannot be said.

The approach to the young Brahms's Sonata in F minor was equally direct. But here the firebrand composer was matched by a firebrand performer, with Thibaudet showing himself willing to launch headlong at the fiercest of the sonata's many fierce demands.

The brassily assertive opening of this work is a prime example of romantic pianistic thunder, one which not only returns during the course of the first movement, but which is wound up a few notches in some of its recurrences. Thibaudet engaged fully with the youthful fervour of the writing, a fervour which thrived on his ability to follow through on the extravagant climactic expectations Brahms builds up.

He was equally sensitive at the opposite end of the scale, shaping soft lines with fluidity and tucking away the awkward rat-a-tats that underline the falling melody of the fourth movement Intermezzo with enviable ease. And the no-holds-barred rush at the end of the Finale was of the hair-streaming kind that almost leaves one breathless.