It has become the tradition at the West Cork Chamber Music Festival to take a sort of midweek break. With rehearsals continuing apace for the later concerts, the Wednesdays in the first two festivals were given over to choral music in out-of-town venues, churches in Schull and Skibbereen.
Those choral events didn't quite work out, and this year the festival stayed in Bantry, but moved to the Church of Ireland for a work too large to be accommodated in the home venue of Bantry House - Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde.
And what, you might reasonably ask, would the Mahler be doing in a chamber music festival? And how might it be fitted in? The answers lie in Schoenberg's society for the private performance of music. This short-lived project welcomed down-sizings of orchestral works, and Schoenberg had mapped out, but not finished, a version of Mahler's great valedictory work, before his private performance initiative folded in 1921; his task was completed by Rainer Riehn in the early 1980s.
Much has often been made of the chamber-like nature of much of Mahler's scoring, even when he had the resources of a large symphony orchestra at his disposal, and it might have been expected that this characteristic would have been even more apparent with just 14 players on the platform. But conductor Lionel Friend took what you might call the orchestral substitution route, with the result that the familiar battle for supremacy between voice (the heroic Belgian tenor Ludwig van Gijsegem) and instruments in the opening song didn't actually get sidestepped in this performance.
More surprising, perhaps, were the imbalances which were allowed to persist in parts of the final song, Das Abschied, surely the peak of Mahler's achievement, and here sung with a penetrating depth of understanding, but not always with the desired audibility, by mezzo soprano Alison Browner.
The fascinating if slightly frustrating exercise of the Mahler (which clearly invites the festival to explore one-to-apart works up to about the size of Schoenberg's First Chamber Symphony) was preceded by a genial performance of that most genial of works by the young Beethoven, the Septet, here serving as an aperitif to the burdened messages of the Mahler.
