Star Rating: ****

The first in a new series of Monday lunchtime concerts began at the Academy this afternoon with a performance of Elliot Carter's dramatic and intense Piano Sonata from 1946 performed by Peter Seivewright.

As one of the great giants of the American piano repertoire, the Piano Sonata seems to embody the serious, polyphonic, atonal, abstract concerns of European Modernism as well as, at the same time, seeming to perfect what might be called the typical American sound - itself an amalgamated contradiction of harmonic space and chromaticism, melancholy and prescribed sentiment.

Seivewright's performance draws in the audience almost inconspicuously, as if he had forgotten we were there, and as if we had forgotten we were there, so enthralled and concentrated we became, disappearing for long moments into the deep complexity of the music, before being jolted back to the present by sudden breaks in the relentless texture, or dramatic shifts in dynamics, all of which gave one pause over succumbing to the sound, and made one suspect that the music would always have the last word.

At least if Seivewright were to have anything to do with it.

American music has traditionally made a virtue of cultural mix and musical diasporas. Seivewright's committed performance of the Scots-Irish American composer Edward McDowell Piano Sonata no. 4 Keltic, is a case in point.

However, it at times muses unconvincingly on Celtic mythology albeit with strong and distinctive American accent - the latter set out through spacious, faltering harmonic passages, that were ultimately overcome by the urgent, tightly formed dance rhythms and scales drawn from a folk music palette.