Bach and Dmitri Shostakovich are the most famous but by no means the only composers to have coded strings of letters into their music.
They both worked with thematic material related to the letters of their names, BACH and DSCH (the S and H are delivered by German musical nomenclature).
Philip Martin's Celebration Quartet, the surprise sprung on the organisers to mark the opening of the 10th West Cork Chamber Music Festival on Saturday, went even further, resorting to eye-music, and tracing the W and M from the festival's title into the angular shape of a musical line. And the festival's second commission of the year, Prichet, for solo violin, by Elena Firsova, works in the composer's own initials, as well as those of her husband and their two children.
Firsova, a Russian who's been living in Britain since the early 1990s, has written a straightforward, romantically expressionist lament, composed after the death of her mother, to whose memory it is dedicated. Monday's premiere by Patricia Kopatchinskaja took it from barely audible keening whispers to jarring explosions with all that precision of gesture and individuality of character which make her playing so special.
Two major works by Schubert featured in the day's offerings, the tunefully genial Trout Quintet (members of the Mondrian Ensemble with pianist Mihaela Ursuleasa and double bassist Hans Roelofsen), and his final string quartet, in G, D887, a work that pushes remarkably hard at boundaries of scale and dramatic utterance, played by the Rosamunde Quartet.
The performance of the quintet had all the sense of ease and natural shapeliness which was lacking when it was heard at the Vogler Spring Festival earlier this year. And the playing of the quartet was spellbinding, grasping the music's strange blend of juggernaut momentum and intimate caress with such imagination that the rough edges created along the way hardly seemed to matter.
Soprano Mairéad Buicke gave a midday programme of Barber, Mahler and Strauss with pianist Brenda Hurley, and also sang Schubert's song, Die Forelle (The Trout), as an insert in the quintet which bears its name.
Her singing was secure and forthright but often seemed poorly matched to her material. It was as if she were treating the musical line as a mere carrier of vocal tone rather than regarding the voice as the servant of both words and music. The vocal delivery was impressive, but the overall effect in the small spaces of Bantry House had a consistency which became unrelenting.
The day's events also included ardent performances of solo cello suites by Britten (No 1) and Bach (No 6) by Pieter Wispelwey, as well as of Mozart's String Quintet in C, the elaborate viola parts being shared between the RTÉ Vanbrugh Quartet's Simon Aspell and Vladimir Mendelssohn. - Michael Dervan
Second City Trilogy - Half Moon Theatre, Cork
Beginning with a re-cast production of The Cure, Cónal Creedon's Second City Trilogy takes its full shape at the Half Moon Theatre from now to the end of July. The presentation method is a little confusing, with all three episodes performed every second night, and two - When I Was God and After Luke - every other one. There is another element of confusion: these short plays are not three parts of a whole, but are instead three separate pieces linked only by their location and by having the same author - and in this case by a shared cast.
For The Cure, Michael Patric gives a low-key monologue on a Christmas bender, an urban voyage which is geographically accurate but morally adrift until "the cure" kicks in. Although encompassing industrial betrayals and tricks of local navigation, this is altogether too easy-going and Patric, while in full command of his role, can't do much to make it either engaging or convincing.
He is better cast as the prodigal son in After Luke, in which Creedon works a hectic strand of surrealism into a common domestic dilemma - the upheaval caused by the emigrant's return to a home which has settled quite nicely into its little ways. The sharp comic writing in this piece is Creedon close to his best, especially as it never detracts from the familiarity, and the pathos, of the theme of brotherly rivalry and fatherly love.
But Creedon at his actual best is revealed forcefully in When I Was God, a piece first written and staged several years ago and losing nothing - even gaining something from Geoff Gould's clever staging - with the passage of time.
A soccer referee on the point of retirement remembers the family disputes about his childhood sporting preferences. His father rants about the GAA, his mother wants something more sedate (he settles for table tennis), but the conflict is about more than sport.
Ebullient in its humour, accurate in its human understanding, incisive in its irony, this is a wonderful piece of writing, which is impressively interpreted by Donncha Crowley and Frankie McCafferty (who, with Michael Patric, also make up the cast of After Luke). - Mary Leland
