Review from INTERNATIONAL PIANO REVIEW, January/February 2012

New Ross Piano Festival
22-25 September, 2011

New Ross is a small port town in County Wexford. It’s easy to get to, whether by ferry to Rosslare or flight to Waterford; yet you’d be hard-pressed to think of New Ross as a destination in itself. Except, that is, in a long weekend towards the end of September, when the New Ross Piano Festival brings a volley of top-notch concerts to the serendipitously generous acoustic of St Mary’s Church.

 

Artistic director Finghin Collins, himself a pianist and performer in the festival, puts together a programme that usually sees a number of performers in each concert – the variety is constantly engaging, without becoming bite-size. This year a pair of Steinway Ds were brought in, and some of the cornerstones of the piano duet repertoire, along with a few rarities, were performed by the partnerships of Katya Apekisheva and Charles Owen, Noriko Ogawa and Kathryn Stott, and Igor Roma and Enrico Pace. The standard was consistently high, from the too-rarely heard two-piano version of The Rite of Spring (Owens and Apekisheva) to the thrilling solo performance of Liszt’s Réminiscences de Don Juan by Pace. It was also great to see the ten-year-old partnership of Stott and Ogawa still in good nick – with each performance a genuine chamber music.

 

Kimon Daltas