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Opening Events
Sligo Festival of Baroque Music
The Welsh National Opera's Belfast performance of Gluck's Iphigénie en Tauride with Ann Murray kept me away from the opening day's events at the Sligo Festival of Baroque Music. The talk when I arrived at the Model Arts & Niland Gallery in Sligo on Saturday morning was all of the young counter tenor Owen Willetts's recital with lutenist Richard Sweeney.
Unfortunately, unlike most of the performers at the festival, Willetts was involved in just the one event. But the major performing attraction, Swiss violinist Maya Homburger, who lived in Ireland for a number of years, provided highlights of her own.
She gave a late-night solo recital in which she brought her long-breathed phrasing and almost architectural musical thinking to bear on a fantasia by Telemann and the Partita in D minor by Bach. For me, the best playing in the Bach came before the famous chaconne, which didn't breath as naturally as the other movements, and seemed somehow constrained by the fixity of the musical vision.
Although Homburger plays a baroque instrument at baroque pitch, she also explores contemporary music in her programmes, especially works from the pen of her husband, Barry Guy. Guy's Inachis is one of three works named after butterflies that he wrote to be heard between the Bach solo sonatas and partitas on CD. On Saturday, it sounded like an effective, flighty piece that wisely chooses to contrast with Bach rather than challenge him directly.
Homburger was also heard in ensemble with violinist Matthew Truscott, viol player Sarah Cunningham and harpsichordist Malcolm Proud. This group offered an evening of vividly characterised music-making, which included the amusing, imitative writing of a canonic sonata for two violins by Telemann, the gorgeous contrapuntal and harmonic complexities of two trio sonatas by Purcell, the striking gestures and sonorous richness of two harpsichord pieces by Duphly, and the more clear-cut energies of two trio sonatas by Handel.
Proud and Cunningham also appeared with the musically refined Dutch flautist Wilbert Hazelzet in a programme that rewardingly mixed a trio sonata and flute sonatas by Bach with Marin Marais's Tombeau pour Mr de Ste Colombe for bass viol.
There were interesting repertoire choices in a lunchtime programme of trio sonatas by Trio Quattro (Jenny Robinson on recorders, Anita Vedres on violin, Malachy Robinson on violone and David Adams on harpsichord), including an excerpt from a trio sonata in classical rather than baroque style by a Scottish nobleman, the Earl of Kelly.
The late-night programme of recorder, cello and harpsichord music from Aedín Halpin, Kate Hearne and David Adams suffered from some upside-down balances because of the over-projection of the cello line.
And Halpin, who shone in testing fast passages, seemed less than fully at ease in slow movements.
But any musical limitations of this concert were minor by comparison with the shortcomings of the two theatrical presentations the festival offered, Gainsborough in Bath and Castradiva, both built around the personality and voice of the Welsh mezzo soprano Buddug Verona James.
The first stretched out its conceit at too great a length, and the second depended far too heavily on risqué humour and a rash of poor crotch jokes. James is a secure performer, but handles her strong voice and idiosyncratically fast vibrato with too little variety. There's not much flexibility in her phrasing, and altogether too much of the music hall in her delivery. Michael Dervan
ConTempo String Quartet
NCH John Field Room, Dublin
Haydn: Quartet in D Op 76 No 5
Webern: Slow Movement
Beethoven: Quartet in C Op 59 No 3
The four young Romanians of the ConTempo String Quartet, appointed in 2003 as ensemble-in-residence to Galway city and county, are nearing the end of a ten-day national tour that brought them to the John Field Room at the National Concert Hall on Monday night.
They opened their rather cautious programme with No 5 from Haydn's last completed set of quartets, Op 76 of 1797. Their playing was light and perfectly balanced in the first movement's variations, and leader Bogdan Sofei brought an easy, delicate touch to the ever-changing decoration of the movement's lilting and hummable theme.
The flying Hungarian folk-dance of the closing presto was full of joyful energy.
Webern's Slow Movement for String Quartet was written just over a century later in 1905. Another five years after that and Webern's style would be irrevocably changed to the taut concision and post-tonality associated with his teacher Schoenberg and the Second Viennese School.
But in 1905 Webern was still writing in a luxuriant, late romantic manner. He was deeply in love at the time, and the nine-minute Slow Movement's language is tender and tonal. The ConTempo changed gear and produced a broader, richer sound to give full expression to Webern's ardour.
Unlike the Slow Movement, Beethoven's three Rasumovsky quartets of Op 59 are the product of a composer who had finished assimilating the style of his immediate predecessors - in this case Haydn and Mozart - and moved on into a new creative world. The very idea of newness, of fearless exploration, seemed to underpin the ConTempo's concentrated energy in this performance, culminating in the rapid-fire contrapuntal interplay of the fugal finale.
ConTempo String Quartet play at St Peter's Church, Drogheda, Co Louth tomorrow at 8 p.m. and at Elmwood Hall, Belfast (as part of the Belfast Festival at Queen's) on Saturday at 11 a.m. Michael Dungan
