West Cork Chamber Music Festival
Bantry, Co Cork
★★★★☆
It was back in 1996 that the first West Cork Chamber Music Festival took place. Many of the now familiar features from its 30th iteration were present from the start.
The 14 concerts at Bantry House were given by multiple string quartets (the RTÉ Vanbrugh and Quatuor Parisii) and multiple pianists (Philippe Cassard and Barry Douglas), who mixed and matched with another half-dozen performers for what you might call bespoke ensembles working together for the first time.
Poetry was not just sung but also spoken by poets. Michael Hartnett read his Mountains, Fall on Us in Haydn’s Seven Last Words of Our Saviour on the Cross, Seamus Heaney read his Squarings with Bach’s Sixth Solo Cello Suite. There were works by living composers: John Tavener’s The Hidden Treasure and To a Child Dancing in the Wind, Robert Simpson’s String Quartet No 7, and the premiere of Jane O’Leary’s Mystic Play of Shadows.
There were masterclasses, though none dealt with string quartets, as most of them do now, and a choral concert in Schull.
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Choral music hasn’t featured much since then, though outreach programmes now bring music far from Bantry, and include visits to Bere, Whiddy, Sherkin and Hare Islands, as well to Cork Airport.
This year’s festival, which ended on Sunday, even has repertoire overlaps with the first: Debussy’s String Quartet, Bach’s Sixth Solo Cello Suite, Haydn’s Seven Last Words and Brahms’s Piano Quintet, with Barry Douglas at the piano, just as in 1996.
The most striking changes between then and now are ones of scale. Three other spaces have been called into service as concert venues. This year’s programme lists 57 concerts and 29 masterclasses, and outreach events now exceed the total number of concerts given in the first festival.
Scale comes into changes in performing style over the past three decades, too. Take the youthful octet for strings completed in 1900 by Romania’s greatest composer, George Enescu, when he was just shy of 19. I haven’t been able to trace an Irish performance of this exuberant work before the festival programmed it in 2003.
An even younger composer, Felix Mendelssohn, wrote what’s still the greatest octet at an even younger age (16), and wrote that the work “must be played by all the instruments in symphonic orchestral style”. Enescu took his cue from the kind of sonority that Mendelssohn had in mind, and wrote music that is even richer, more complex, often like a sonic tapestry that is so dense it can hardly be fully absorbed in real time.
This year’s supercharged, let-it-all-hang-out performance by the combined Marmen and Doric Quartets winds it up a notch or three in drive and intensity. There is never a risk of it sounding other than orchestral. It’s a white-knuckle ride, tremendously exciting but at the same time having, for the listener, something of the quality of trying to take in a gorgeous landscape while being blinded by the sun.
The Chiaroscuro Quartet, led by Alina Ibragimova, have long made high drama and sharp contrasts a feature of their playing. The middle ground suffers, not because they don’t do it well but because they’re apt to spend so little time there. Their success depends on a kind of suspension of disbelief, and when that works they’re often second to none.
This year it works in Haydn’s Seven Last Words. In this extraordinary set of seven slow movements, which takes more than an hour to perform, their gutsy and searing but also often intimate playing is interleaved with poems commissioned from Paula Meehan. Her calm, slightly lilting delivery potentiates the impact of her messages about contemporary issues we all know of but would rather not have to dwell on. It’s easy to imagine that, religious as he was, Haydn would have preferred the concentrated compassion of her words over the homilies given by the bishop of Cádiz at the first performance, in 1787.
The Chiaroscuro Quartet concentrate on Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert, but the most impressive performances in this repertoire that I hear at this year’s festival comes from the Tchalik Quartet, for their sheer loveliness in the slow movement from Mozart’s Hunt Quartet and their almost old-fashioned savoir-faire in Beethoven’s Quartet in B flat, Op 130, and the Marmen Quartet, who bring a somewhat similar perspective to Haydn’s Quartet in D, Op 33 No 6, and Mozart’s Dissonance Quartet.
They use an exceptionally well-stocked arsenal of tonal and timbral wizardry, the kind of technical finesse that was not around much in the musical world of the late 20th century. The range of their stylistic affinity also extends to the altogether different warmth and glow of two very different French quartets, those of Debussy and Ravel.
Quatuor Ardeo, among the stars of the 2023 festival, are in less good form this year. They set the bar high, and a more disciplined and tightly wound approach to music-making than theirs is hard to imagine. This time around they offer an unusual performance of Janacek’s Second String Quartet (Intimate Letters), a work the composer wrote in the throes of his unrequited passion for a much younger married woman, and which he originally planned to feature a viola d’amore rather than a regular viola.
The viola d’amore is a baroque instrument that has a set of sympathetic strings that vibrate freely and add a kind of haze or halo to its sound. Janacek, it seems, was as much interested in the amore as in the sound. It’s fascinating to hear the original conception, but, though it’s no fault of the players, the viola d’amore can’t really match up to the stronger tone of the other instruments, apart from the delicate fading of the sympathetic strings that can be heard during silences. The Ardeo also offer a performance of Bach’s Art of Fugue that aims so high in purity that it feels rather too much like an ascetic ritual.
The best of this year’s new works, When You Think You’re Looking, setting words by Jessica Traynor, comes from Deirdre Gribbin. It’s for soprano (Lucy Fitz Gibbon) and string quartet (the Marmen again) and is a follow-on from last year’s Magdalene Songs project, for which Gribbin set Traynor’s An Education in Silence. The story of the inhumanity of the Magdalene laundries, in full view but not seen for so many years, is clearly not going away.
The new work sets six first-person narratives, again by Traynor, Fitz Gibbon delivering the words with intensity, the four strings providing vivid scene setting and responses. It’s an exploration of the experience of displacement and incarceration. It fleshes out in sound a world that would once have been treated as cases into the feelings of real people suffering the consequences of oppression. It’s one of those pieces that are much more than the sum of their parts.
The German-Irish cellist Nuala McKenna makes her festival debut in Britten’s First Suite for solo cello (the first work the composer wrote for the great Russian cellist Mstislav Rostropovich) and Bach’s Sixth Suite. Musically, solo-cello music often sounds a little unwieldy in performance, with a lot of rhythmic adjustments effected by choosing notes to linger on expressively. It’s an alternative to dynamic shaping, and you could regard it as the musical equivalent of driving out into the middle of the road to turn a corner.
McKenna shows a kind of discipline that enables her to turn musical corners cleanly, and the result is a hugely refreshing reworking of performing patterns that have been established since the advent of sound recording. Even better than her Bach is the Britten Suite, which, to use an analogy often invoked in the world of historically informed performances, sounds like the musical equivalent of removing layers of varnish from a great painting.
Other wonderful performances come from the Australian mezzo-soprano Lotte Betts-Dean (in a programme with her father, the viola-playing composer Brett Dean), Barry Douglas (in Listz’s B minor Sonata and Brahms’s Piano Quintet – the Marmen, yet again), the baroque violinist Rachel Podger (perhaps coming across as a touch ditsy in speaking to the audience, sharp as a tack in her playing) and the final work of the festival, Tchaikovsky’s exuberant Souvenir de Florence string sextet, performed by the father and daughter Henning and Alma Serafin Kraggerud on violin, Emma Wernig and Séamus Hickey on viola, and Ella van Poucke and Christopher Marwood on cello.
Clearly, chamber music in west Cork is as healthy as ever.
