Today's look at the arts
St Mary's Church, New Ross
The New Ross Piano Festival is a small festival with a clear formula. It takes place over a weekend, and the piano is at the centre of everything.
Three leading pianists play in the three main concerts, but rather than have the stars appear on their own, the three players share each of the three programmes, and a guest chamber ensemble -this year a German string trio, the Berlin-based Ovid Trio - teams up with a different player every day.
John O'Conor, who has his formal 60th birthday concert with the RIAM Symphony Orchestra at the National Concert Hall tonight, was the senior figure in this year's line-up. And he was more than just physically present. The festival's artistic director, Finghin Collins, was a pupil of his, as was Maria McGarry, who gave one of the festival's two shorter recitals.
O'Conor was billed to play Schubert and Grieg, but abandoned the selection of the latter's Lyric Pieces (works new to his repertoire), due to a bout of illness and the misfortune of having been bitten on the hand by a dog.
Signs of any unusual indisposition, happily, were not to be found in his playing, apart from some roughening of surface in the earlier of Schubert's A major sonatas. He substituted three pieces by John Field for the Grieg, and played them in his familiar mellifluous manner. And he sounded thoroughly at home in the genial world of Schubert's Trout Quintet, with the Ovid Trio and Dominic Dudley on double bass.
The visiting trio, sadly, were mostly workmanlike in manner, penny-plain in expression, and with a leader whose intonation was not always reliable. The problems of intonation were at their most intrusive in Mozart's G minor Piano Quartet with Finghin Collins, and the group's best moments came in Brahms's C minor Piano Quartet with Freddy Kempf, when the viola-player, Amalia Aubert, was a characterful presence.
It was Kempf who offered the festival's most provocative playing. He opened with a performance of Schumann's Études Symphoniques that seemed to stretch boundaries in every direction, with tempos that could be either unpredictably slow or fast, and with the significance of every melodic strand, the voicing of every chord, assessed and weighed afresh.
Not everything was equally convincing. But the music-making had an invigorating freshness, not least because the virtuosity was not of the kind that hides all the difficulties. Kempf is a player who's happy to remind one of the challenges of the undertaking, making at times for a kind of musical equivalent of whitewater rafting.
His handling of Bach's Partita in E minor was in the same mould, so much so, in fact, that it rather took the edge off the performance that followed, Finghin Collins playing Roberto Gerhard's piano arrangement of dances from his ballet, Don Quixote. Side-by-side with Bach, the Gerhard dances seem to do far more striving than delivering, though Collins managed to invest the twanging rhythms of The Cave of Montesinos with considerable appeal.
Collins abandoned his solo role in Saturday night's concert for a stint as a piano duettist with his sister, Dearbhla. They gave a nicely-turned account of one of the greatest works of the piano duet repertoire, Schubert's Fantasy in F minor, its haunting opening enhanced by the lightness of the pedalling.
The duo were heard also in the first set of Brahms's Liebeslieder for piano duet and vocal quartet (soprano Norah King, mezzo soprano Martha Bredin, tenor Niall Morris, and baritone Jamie Rock). The singers, unfortunately, sang with a forced intensity of tone and a weight of vibrato that was completely at odds with the character of the music and almost totally obliterated the charm of these unusual explorations of the waltz.
Maria McGarry produced some of the loveliest sounds I've heard from her in a programme of Chopin, Bartók, Granados and Messiaen. I'm not sure that Bartók's Out of Doors Suite really benefits from the often low-key approach she adopted. But Granados's most famous piano piece, Quejas, o La maja y el ruiseñor was certainly delivered with full allure.
The other solo recital was given by Swiss pianist Cédric Pescia, who won the 2002 Gina Bachauer competition in Salt Lake City with some unusual repertoire choices (Bach's Goldberg Variations and Mozart's Concerto in E flat, K271).
In New Ross he offered Couperin, Messiaen, Chopin and Debussy, and had interesting slants on everything he played, in spite of the fact that a leg injury forced him to use crutches to get on stage and to pedal with his left foot. Musically, the arrangement seemed to cause no impediment, and his most memorable achievement was the wonderful, evocative clarity of his account of Le Courlis Cendré from Messiaen's Catalogue d'Oiseaux.
Michael Dervan
