Shannon International Music Festival's move from Killaloe to Limerick has worked to the event's advantage, writes Michael Dervan
The big question at Shannon International Music Festival 2004 was the obvious one. Had the move to St Mary's cathedral in Limerick by the Irish Chamber Orchestra's Killaloe Music Festival been a success? There's no doubt that the special atmosphere and beauty of Killaloe have been lost, but there's equally no gainsaying the fact that in most respects the move has been to the festival's advantage.
The 12th-century cathedral in Limerick is currently in what you might call a state of undress, the restoration of the interior having occasioned the removal of plaster from walls and pillars but not yet its replacement by new surfaces. But the venue is welcoming. It provides greater creature comforts in terms of seating than St Flannan's in Killaloe, and for more of the audience it's a happier listening environment, too.
St Flannan's had a small number of acoustically acceptable seats and a much larger number of acoustically undesirable ones. St Mary's is more equable, and I heard praise being expressed around me for the improvement that listeners were experiencing.
Yet there is a certain lack of presence in the St Mary's sound, as if some essential musical information is not being caught and carried to the listeners. The Irish Chamber Orchestra's managers were diligent about trying to remedy the very serious difficulties of St Flannan's, so let's hope they will be equally resourceful in Limerick, where, particularly for lunchtime and late-night events, they have been able to attract much larger audiences than at Killaloe.
The greatest strength St Mary's showed in this year's concerts was the way in which it carried the sound of the soprano voice. Saturday's lunchtime programme was given by the rapidly rising Limerick soprano Mairéad Buicke, whose wide-ranging programme - Handel, Schumann, Mahler, Duparc, Poulenc, Stanford, Quilter, Dvorák and Puccini - with Deborah Kelleher (piano) showed a musical manner that was forthright, a tone that was pleasing and a delivery that was sure and strong.
There's not yet a great deal of musical variety or stylistic distinction in her singing, and at times it seemed as if the nuancing of the texts was being communicated as much by her eyes as by her voice. But the voice is one that commands serious attention, and, as the closing aria by Puccini ('Donde Lieta' from La Bohème) revealed, there are exciting turbo-charged reserves to be called on when required.
Dominique Labelle, the impressive soloist from the opening concert, appeared again on Saturday to give pointed accounts of a group of arias by Alessandro Scarlatti, with harpsichord accompaniment by Nicholas McGegan.
The Mexican recorder player Horacio Franco performed on two nights, playing concertos by Sammartini and Vivaldi with the ICO and a recorder solo by his compatriot Daniel Catán (who made rather dull use of the trick of playing two record- ers at once), as well as an arrangement of Bach's Chaconne for Solo Violin that often seemed to bear little useful resemblance to the original.
Franco's musical approach was to go over the top and stay there as much as possible. His fondness for embellishment in the concertos was so consistent it seemed as if he regarded the composers' notes primarily as opportunities for him to insert extra ones of his own. And his inclination towards fireworks virtuosity tended to skid off balance, with clarity of articulation and security of rhythm being at times severely compromised. His was indeed quite a show but mostly not a musically interesting one.
The ICO itself was on uneven form, surprisingly variable in McGegan's home territory of the baroque. The playing was altogether finer in the more recent works McGegan chose from the soft underbelly of new music in his adopted home, the US. Morton Gould's 1993 Stringmusic has all the manner of significance but little of the matter, and Aaron Jay Kernis's 1990 Musica Celestis, with its high string textures like echo-smeared synthesizer lines, has the easy emotionality of soft-focus, wet-hankie Hollywood romanticism.
The orchestra played these pieces with the commitment if not quite the discipline they've shown at their best in the past. But they took the challenges of the altogether more persuasively argued Concerto for Strings of the Argentinian composer Alberto Ginastera easily in their stride. On the basis of this festival it would have been easy to imagine McGegan to be a 20th-century specialist (albeit with a sweet tooth) rather than a baroque-music man.
The very capable British percussionist Adrian Spillett joined the orchestra for Ney Rosauro's Marimba Concerto and Ian Vine's Siri for percussion and tape, two more samples of predigested music from recent decades.
There was nothing predigested in the chamber-music presentations of the Quartetto Stradivari, led by Mariana Sirbu with Mihai Dancila on cello (both of whom were members of the RTÉ Academica Quartet), with their daughter Cristina Dancila on second violin and Massimo Paris on viola.
Sirbu has a tendency to worry melodic lines a lot, even to the point of making the amiable songfulness of Dvorák's American Quartet sound nervy and fraught. Hers is an artful style, but the artfulness tended in all the works she played - Mozart's G minor Quintet, with ICO chief executive John Kelly making a respectable showing on second viola, and Schubert's Quintet in C, with Ferenc Szücs on second cello - to draw attention away from the music and onto the playing.
The other chamber group, the Szabó Trio (violinist Gabrielle Painter, ICO cellist Benedict Rogerson and pianist Leslie Hollingworth), were at the other extreme, offering impressively fluent, nicely turned readings of trios by Beethoven and Mendelssohn, which settled somewhere on the bland side of comfortable.
In other concerts the NYOI Camerata Strings, trained by Michael d'Arcy and led by Julia O'Riordan, were at their sharpest in Arthur Duff's Irish Suite, and the pianist Isabelle O'Connell found her best form in John Buckley's Three Preludes.
