Michael Dervanreviews the West Cork Chamber Music Festival in Bantry, Co Cork while Martin Adamsreviews Finucane, Billing, Sutton, RTÉ NSO/Markson at the NCH in Dublin

West Cork Chamber Music Festival
Bantry, Co Cork

Wednesday is always a day with a difference at the West Cork Chamber Music Festival. Festival director Francis Humphrys temporarily abandons Bantry House for St Brendan's Church, where a larger stage can be erected, and groups up to the size of a small orchestra can be accommodated.

The focus this year was mainly on extremes, and mainly Russian. Not all the extremes were essential. The performance of Tchaikovsky's string sextet Souvenir de Florence, bringing together members of the Kopelman and RTÉ Vanbrugh Quartets, was so fiercely driven, so dominated by the tone of Mikhail Kopelman on first violin, and so disdainful of many of the composer's detailed dynamic markings, that it took on an aspect of parody. But it fully hit the spot in targeting listeners' responses to musical excess, constituting a kind of romping, no-holds-barred analogue to the explosive implausibilities of the Die Hard movies.

The excesses of Alfred Schnittke's 1979 Concerto for piano and strings were fully intended by the composer, who employed gestures as heavy as the strokes of a painter using finger or hand rather than brush, and contrasted them with sounds of almost seraphic purity. Yuri Serov was the crunching, grinding soloist who also gave a modern tinge to the mechanical patterns of the 18th-century, and Nicholas Daniel conducted the Festival Strings with an ardency which was leavened by the variety of light, shade and texture he achieved in an often densely-conceived work.

Serov was back on stage at the end of the day with mezzo soprano Mila Shkirtil for a performance of Valery Gavrilin's Russian Songbook, his graduation piece at the Leningrad Conservatory, which also won him a Glinka Prize in 1967. Folk influences are clear in this sometimes hysterical setting of texts exploring the experiences of a peasant girl. Shkirtil and Serov took the extraordinary range of the eight songs, melodrama and all, in their stride, with Shkirtil turning in a tour-de-force of vocal narrative and acting.

This year, Wednesday fell on July 4th, so the day's first recital, still at Bantry House, focused entirely on American songs. The most remarkable inclusion in the programme from Mary Hegarty (soprano) and Nicole Panizza (piano) was John Corigliano's extended cycle Mr Tambourine Man: Seven Poems of Bob Dylan, which the composer claims to have written without knowing Dylan's original songs, although he was actually resident on Earth and not Mars in the 1960s.

His idea is a lovely one, but the settings seem altogether too arty and artsy for the plain power of the words. The imaginative appropriation turned out to be an inappropriate one. Hegarty and Panizza delivered the music with an expressive sharpness that had been missing from their handling of songs by Barber and Bernstein.

The festival continues until Sun

Michael Dervan

Finucane, Billing, Sutton, RTÉ NSO/Markson
NCH, Dublin
Suppé - Poet and Peasant Overture. Weber - Clarinet Concertino. Schubert/Webern - German Dances (exc). Mendelssohn - Concert Piece No 2 for clarinet and basset horn. Johann Strauss - Wiener Blut

The word stylish came to mind on several occasions during this lunchtime orchestral concert. That was partly because of the playing, and partly because of the unusual yet effective programme. Three generally unfamiliar works were sandwiched between two favourite lollipops. These five pieces included two rarities, both of which were transcriptions.

All the music came from Germany and Austria and was written between 1810 and 1870. The contrast between pieces was sometimes startling. But it all worked, and it held its audience's attention.

One of the transcriptions, and by far the most unusual item on the programme, was Webern's 1931 orchestral arrangement of some of Schubert's German Dances. Gerhard Markson conducted these in a steady and straight way that reinforced both their peasant-dance origins and Webern's strange, ear-teasing orchestration.

That restrained centre-piece was framed by virtuoso displays from the clarinet family. In Weber's Clarinet Concertino, soloist John Finucane grasped this light yet striking piece's wide-ranging exploration of the clarinet as virtuoso and as lyricist.

Mendelssohn's Concert Piece No 2, originally for piano, clarinet and basset horn, was presented with the piano part arranged for orchestra, though we were not told who the arranger was. The soloists, Matthew Billing (clarinet) and Fintan Sutton (basset horn), clearly enjoyed this clever piece, and entered into the spirit of a work that relishes the instruments' differences and similarities.

In the concert's opening and closing items, but notably in Johann Strauss's Wiener Blut, the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra was responsive to Gerhard Markson's flexibility with tempo.

As usual with this conductor, familiar music was not taken for granted, but was thought out afresh.

This performance of the Strauss, which managed to combine energy and poise, fully justified the effort.

Martin Adams