The Island Muse, The Riverfront

2:57pm Friday 9th May 2008

One composer present at a concert is an event, four is a miracle of circumstance.

The quartet which stood to acknowledge the applause for their music at the Riverfront's latest First Wednesday recital were Ian Lawson, Ben Heneghan, Robert Atkins and Andrew Wilson-Dickson.

The last was the keyboard recitalist, accompanying flautist Catherine Handley in a programme of British music.

I defy anyone not to be enthused by Wilson-Dickson, especially when he says, as he did here, that Arnold Bax is his favourite composer.

Bax's Four Pieces are reductions from an orchestral ballet score that proved to be unplayable by the musicians it was intended for, an anecdote so risible that it begs qualification.

It was played with sweeping accomplishment, as was another rejected commission, Wilson-Dickson's own Tango Passacaglia, which was a dance step too far for the otherwise unfazable London Tango Orchestra.

It isn't so much the J S Bach theme threading through it that must have worsted the LTO, as the complexity with which the tango rhythm is essayed.

The composer showed what a (deceptively) easy piece it is by transcribing it separately for violin and flute.

Catherine Handley's playing throughout was magisterial and enjoined by subtle and exuberant keyboard effects, both musicians sharing the honours in Lawson's Academic Sonata, written with corking maturity in 1977 while he was still a student.

Heneghan's From Summer to Autumn and Atkins's Tambourin (arranged by Wilson-Dickson) were conclusive proof that the two performers and the composers sitting in the audience knew one another and were on the samewavelength.

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