Accordion, chamber orchestra and solo percussion were the focus of Wednesday's concerts at the West Cork Chamber Music Festival in Bantry.
Accordionist Dermot Dunne has won a very special place in the hearts of the Irish public since taking the top prize at the RTE Musician of the Future Competition in 1996. His hour-long Bantry programme blended transcriptions and arrangements with original, late-20th-century works chosen from the less demanding end of the repertoire.
Of the original works, it was James Wilson's Donizetti Variations which held the interest most successfully - Rendine's Passacaglia was banal, Repnikov's Toccata-Capriccio shallowly showy.
Neither Liszt's Sixth Hun- garian Rhapsody nor excerpts from Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition transfer to solo accordion with more than momentary success. Dunne is an adroit and musicianly player, and it was in the arrangement by Yashkevich of Brahms's Hungarian Dance No. 5 that the full range of his exceptional talent seemed to be best revealed.
The Swedish Chamber Orchestra conducted by HansKristian Sorensen offered James MacMillan (the desolation and violence of the 1996 Meditation on Iona), Peteris Vasks (the new age indulgence of his 1997 violin concerto, Distant Light, ardently delivered by Katarina Andreasson), Arvo Part (one of the more agitated versions of Fratres, for solo violin - Roger Olsson - percussion and strings), and Lutoslawski (the 1972 Preludes and Fugue for 13 solo strings, played as an engrossing encyclopaedia of modernist musical gesture).
And then, a mere half an hour later, Hans-Kristian Sorensen returned to the platform in St Brendan's Church to deliver a demanding solo programme: two of John Cage's most muted pre-aleatoric offerings (A Flower and The wonderful widow of eighteen springs, both for voice and closed piano), and three works from the 1980s, Kevin Volans's intricate She who sleeps with a small blanket for drums and marimba, Franco Donatoni's mesmerisingly resourceful Omar for solo vibraphone (the second half, unfortunately, rather fragmented by the pauses for stick-changing), and Iannis Xenakis's explosively thrilling Rebonds for drums and wood-blocks.
Whether in meditative mode or at his most vigorously energised, Sorensen is a charismatic communicator. His daredevil assault on the Xenakis brought the audience cheering to its feet.
