WEST CORK CHAMBER MUSIC FESTIVAL

Bantry, Co Cork, Fri 28th-

Sat, July 3rd 1850-788789, westcorkmusic.ie

The West Cork Chamber Music Festival begins a day early this year so the organisers can take a brief breath before the start of the West Cork Literary Festival. The musical mix remains as rich as ever.

There’s an unusual inclusion this year, with the Irish Youth Choir and the National Youth Orchestra under Greg Beardsell bringing their tour of Brahms’s German Requiem, Barber’s Prayers of Kierkegaard and Ives’s Unanswered Question to St Finbarr’s Church.

The festival has a reputation for seeking out the rare and unusual as well as the great and good. This year’s unusual offerings include the first act of Mozart’s Don Giovanni played by the Artis String Quartet, Jörg Widmann’s Octet (with Widmann himself on clarinet) and Fifth String Quartet (like Schoenberg’s Second, it’s still called a string quartet even though it adds a soprano to the four strings). There’s also a whole programme of music by composers interned in Terezin by the Nazis, and a concert to celebrate the 75th birthday of Arvo Pärt.

String quartets are at the heart of the festival, and choices range widely, covering Nielsen, Prokofiev, Mozart (all six Haydn Quartets), Wellesz, Weigl, Beethoven, Grieg, Schubert, Janacek, Shostakovich, Haydn, Mendelssohn, and Zemlinsky. There are also piano quintets by Fleischmann, Schubert, Vierne, Beethoven and Tchaikovsky (Boris, not Piotr). Visiting ensembles include two groups led by starry young violinists (the Benedetti Trio with Nicola Benedetti and the Chiaroscuro Quartet – pictured – with Alina Ibragimova). The younger generation of composers gets a look in, with premieres of work by Ryan Molloy (Third Epistle to Timothy), Breffni O’Byrne (String Quartet No 1) and Marc Tweedie (Cyclical Behaviour).

There’s been one important change to the originally advertised roster of performers. The Escher String Quartet will take the place of the Pacifica Quartet. MICHAEL DERVAN