WHAT’S IN A NAME? The West Cork Chamber Music Festival, say? It all seems pretty obvious. Music-making on an intimate scale, works intended for small spaces, some of them created for performers rather than listeners. But then what’s a Lute Concerto by Vivaldi doing in there? Or excerpts from Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas?
The history of what we call chamber music is not as black and white as we might like to think. The concept is now an instrumental one. But, centuries ago, vocal music played a much larger part. Mendelssohn’s Octet, that extraordinary expression of teenage genius, complicated everything in 1825 by seeking to bring orchestral effects to what was then an essentially domestic medium. “This octet,” he said, “must be played by all the instruments in the style of a symphonic orchestra. Pianos and fortes must be exactly observed and more strongly emphasised than is usual in works of this type.”
And Schoenberg’s First Chamber Symphony of 1906, as its title suggests, strained the idea of chamber music to its limits, with 15 players creating a complexity and volume of sound that contradict the “Chamber” of the title.
By the early 20th century, of course, chamber music had become very much at home in the concert hall. In the second half of that century the early-music movement effectively brought orchestral works from the 18th century and earlier back into the chamber domain, by having them performed with one player to a part rather than multiple violins, violas and cellos. And in the early 1980s Joshua Rifkin even turned Bach’s Mass in B minor into a kind of chamber music, with the choruses sung one to a part rather than by a choir.
For many people that’s the key distinction. Chamber music uses one player to a part. Orchestral music has serried ranks of string players, with sections playing in unison. But it’s all now a kind of melting pot, and that’s even before you take performing style in the broadest sense into account.
The two visiting string quartets heard over the first weekend of the West Cork Chamber Music Festival, in Bantry, illustrated the extremes. Germany’s Signum Quartet took a full-on, pseudo-orchestral approach to Schubert’s Death and the Maiden Quartet, each of the four players letting their hair down with the freedom of orchestral musicians faced with a lax conductor. The full-on approach often found all four players seeking to project themselves into the foreground.
Poland’s Apollon Musagète Quartett were, with the exception of a single performance, at the opposite end of the spectrum. Their approach in 20th- and 21st-century works by fellow countrymen Karol Szymanowski (his First Quartet of 1917) and Krzysztof Penderecki (his Third Quartet of 2008) was one of the utmost expressive delicacy and refinement. They never lacked in forcefulness of delivery when it was called for, but they never indulged it for its own sake. The otherworldliness of the Szymanowski and the stylistic prolixity of the Penderecki were both handled with razor-like economy.
And the exception? That came in an encore, an arrangement of Stravinsky’s intentionally dry, almost deconstructed Tango. Delivered with incredibly exaggerated enthusiasm, it was as if someone found a cubist line-drawing and naturalised it by fixing the disconnects and colouring the whole thing in with crayon. A more bizarre approach to this particular piece by Stravinsky would be hard to imagine.
The performing style of the RTÉ Vanbrugh String Quartet in Brahms’s late String Quintet in G, with Lawrence Power on second viola, fell somewhere in between. They never seemed to seek out the degree of soft-spoken intimacy that’s such a touching feature of the Apollon Musagète’s approach. And while they responded warmly to the moments of mock-orchestral texture Brahms created, they never took them over the top, as the Signums had done in Schubert.
Bantry now has a popular early music strand which mixes genuine chamber music with one-to-a-part performances of works that until recently were the preserve of orchestras. The early music highlight of the opening weekend came from Italian mezzo soprano Cristina Zavalloni with Kate Hearne (recorder and cello), Dohyo Sol (theorbo) and Joanna Boslak-Gornlok (harpsichord).
Zavalloni is a genuine singing actress for whom words, music, and dramatic situation seem inseparable. Everything you wanted to hear from Monteverdi but found lacking in Opera Theatre Company’s recent touring Orfeo was to be found in Zavalloni’s musically riveting performances of Lettera amorosa and Lamento d’Arianna. Monteverdi performed to maximum effect is an experience to keep you on the edge of your seat.
In an all-Purcell programme of excerpts from Dido and Aeneas and The Fairy Queen, with the ensemble Arte dei Suonatori and Kate Hearne on recorder, the vocal honours were shared between two very different sopranos. Maria Keohane (Swedish, in spite of the name) is one of those singers who delights in the sheer beauty of her voice and the agility she has at her command. It’s as if she always sings with a smile. Ruby Hughes is lighter in tone, and her singing is more immediately responsive to the meaning of the words. A full hour of Purcell is a pleasure that’s all too rare in Ireland’s musical life.
Also totally absorbing were the late-night performances of Lutoslawski (the early Recitative e Arioso), Beethoven (the Kreutzer Sonata) and Ravel (the Sonata in G) by violinist Catherine Leonard and pianist Hugh Tinney. The music just flowed from their fingers like a force of nature, as if it couldn’t have been shaped or projected in any superior way.
German violinist Tanja Becker-Bender’s performances of Bartók’s two gritty Violin Sonatas with Peter Nágy at the piano were at the opposite extreme, the music treated like sets of tongue-twisters to be articulated with a degree of care and caution that caused meaning and continuity to fly out the window. It’s not often that I’ve heard anything in a concert that sounded so little like itself as Bartók did from these two players.
Two works involving clarinet uncovered other extremes. Carol McGonnell (clarinet), Andreas Brantelid (cello) and Paavali Jumppanen (piano) played Beethoven’s early Clarinet Trio with effortless ebullience, as an ensemble with no stars. Everyone was equal, and – with some risky impromptu embellishments from Jumppanen – there was a great sense of spontaneity.
On the other hand, clarinettist Christoffer Sundqvist was a star in Weber’s Clarinet Quintet, a work that’s as close to a genuine concerto as anything in the chamber music repertoire. There are five players involved, but what Weber wrote was a showpiece for just one of them. And Sundqvist, suave, agile and utterly seductive in tone, was consistently granted the limelight by an ever-supportive Signum Quartet.
