Tuesday's headline event at the West Cork Chamber Music Festival was the Irish premiere of From Station Island, a setting for speaker, baritone and ensemble of Seamus Heaney poems (with the poet himself onstage as speaker) by the English composer, Anthony Powers.
The music, suggests Powers, "hovers between melodrama (in the old sense of spoken declamation with musical accompaniment) and song-cycle, whilst perhaps suggesting both cinema and chamber opera too".
Heaney's "dream encounters" are of course resonant enough to challenge any would-be setter. They don't need the help of musical onomatopoeia or any other conventional underlinings. But convention is just what Powers provided, imitating rain and whispers, and writing with a fussiness which took time and attention away from the words.
In fact, the music didn't seem so much to adorn the text or illustrate it or provide atmosphere as simply get in its way. Heaney read, a little nervously, it seemed, but with quiet simplicity, in that communicative monotone so favoured by poets. Owen Gilhooly barked the vocal line with a pitch-obscuring impetuosity which cannot have worked in the music's favour. And Laurent Wagner conducted without giving the impression that he had managed to reach a viable overview of the music's shape.
Wagner and his festival ensemble made an altogether better showing in Luciano Berio's Folk Songs, settings of folk songs, real and invented, for the composer's muse and one-time wife, Cathy Berberian.
Berberian had a voice of remarkable range and flexibility, and she used it with all the skills of a first-class impersonator.
Tuesday's soloist, Cristina Zavalloni, is something of a vocal chameleon, too, managing the necessary gyrations of vocal reach and force of tonal extrusion with stylish flair. The audience at St Brendan's Church, which had given Heaney and Powers an enthusiastic response, demanded an encore from Zavalloni, sadly without success.
Patricia Kopatchinskaja is a violinist with, in instrumental terms, the technical variety of a Zavalloni, and the desire to use it at every twist and turn. She made a great effect in Alan Ridout's telling of Ferdinand the Bull for violin and narrator (Zavalloni), but made heavy weather of key moments in Beethoven's Sonata in G, Op 30 No 3, with pianist Mihaela Ursuleasa. She was neat and to the point in Dinicu's Hora staccato, but went way, way over the top in hyping the gypsy flavour of Ravel's Tzigane and hamming up John Cage's Variations I.
There was hamming aplenty, too, in pianist Julius Drake's playing of Brahms's Sonata in E flat, Op 120 No 2, with Swedish clarinettist Martin Fröst, who, if anything, erred at the other end of the scale. Drake showed an altogether better sense of scale in Brahms's Vier ernste Gesänge with the gravely imperious Canadian baritone, Nathan Berg.
Trio Wanderer's early-afternoon programme covered Liszt (Tristia, an arrangement of Vallée d'Obermann for piano solo), Shostakovich (his youthful First Piano Trio) and Babadjanian (a conformist Trio written in the Soviet Union of 1952). The utterly unconventional choice of repertoire was somewhat undermined by a style of playing which flipped all too readily into a kind of general-purpose intensity. - Michael Dervan
