THIS year's Boyle Arts Festival has set out "to give a special platform to young artists, both visual and performing". In the case of the classical music programme, the young players have been selected in association with the Dublin Feis Ceoil, and the first lunchtime recital was given yesterday at the Church of Ireland by the flute and piano duo of Riona O Duinnin and Owen Lorigan, two young players close to the top of the national competitive tree.
It was Riona O Duinnin who made such favourable impression recently through the sensual allure of her solo in the National Youth Orchestra's performance of the second suite from Ravel's Daphnis and Chloe.
However, by comparison, her handling of works by Barber, Dutilleux and Franck at Boyle was short on contrast and the general efficiency of her playing didn't fully compensate for a shortage of sharp musical characterisation her keyboard partner's broader view was, contrariwise, let down by recurring fuzziness of detail. The duo sounded at their best in parts of the Dutilleux Sonatine (written as a Paris Conservatoire test piece), particularly in the cascading, flute writing.
Boyles evening recital (not part of the young musicians focus) was given at King House by guitarist John Feeley. He had been billed to play the early vihuela as well as the guitar, but his vihuela, as he put it, had become "sick" with the change in the weather, so he played a completely different programme to the one advertised.
King House provides as near ideal a venue for the guitar as I have come across in Ireland, and Feeley's revised programme brought the bonus of Bach's Chaconne in D minor as well as works by two Irish composers.
Feeley is a musicianly performer, more graceful by nature than aggressive, though his playing has an edge when it's needed, as it was in the alternations of nagging repetition and assertive strumming in Jerome de Bromhead's "Gemini". The other Irish work was Michael Howard's "Niagara Falls in Foment" (assuming I picked up the title correctly), an easy listening, guitar friendly piece of little moment. Aside from works by Villa Lobos, Tarrega and Giuliani, Feeley chose to thread a pronounced middle brow line through his programme with his own some times overly guitaristic arrangements of Irish and Scottish material.
