Cork violinist Elizabeth Cooney, who gave this year’s National Concert Hall Rising Star recital, is among the select band of Irish string players to have made her mark in an international violin competition. She took the second prize (as well as the audience and test piece prizes) at the International Violin Competition of Sion Valais in Switzerland in 2002.
Her NCH programme, given with her regular pianist, Daniel Hill, was designed to put her through her paces in a wide range of repertoire, from Tartini’s Devil’s Trill Sonata à la Kreisler right up to a new work by the young Irish composer Garrett Sholdice. Cooney produces a tone that is easy and fluid. The devilish trilling effects in the Tartini, both those devised by Tartini and those by Kreisler, held no fears for her, nor did the rapid flights of Beethoven’s early Sonata in E flat, Op.12 No.3. Wieniawski’s Polonaise showed her delighting in technical fireworks, and she tapped enthusiastically into the same vein for the notorious moto perpetuo finale of the sonata by Ravel.
The two were heard at their best in Sholdice’s specially-commissioned Mira Al Agua, which moves from gutsy low-range violin energy (almost as if emulating a guitar with a fuzz box) to a high-lying calm, with a range of other, matching, transformations along the way. And Nathan Milstein’s arrangement of an early Chopin Nocturne showed a style of lyrical violin tone with a range of inflection and also a successful moulding of line and mood .....