Sligo's Model Arts Centre is the venue for the town's Early Music Festival. And "model" would be a fair description of the festival's enterprising spirit in filling gaps in the remarkably sparse concert life of early music in Ireland.
The fortepiano - when did you last hear one in Dublin? - was the major focus of the third Sligo festival, which opened on Friday. The instrument in use was a mellow-sounding copy of a 1795 piano by the Viennese maker Anton Walter, and the player was the American, Maggie Cole, best known as a harpsichordist, but active on keyboards of various ages.
She performed solo pieces, sonatas with violin, and piano trios. In an illustrated talk, she advocated the description "early piano" (on the basis that "fortepiano" and "pianoforte" were used interchangeably in the years of the instrument's infancy) and conveyed clearly her view that the Viennese instruments prized by Mozart and known to the young Beethoven were in truth successors to the intimacy of the clavichord (an instrument so soft in sound it could never be given a place in public concert-giving) rather than the harpsichord, with its greater attack and assertiveness.
Anyone who's encountered players who transform the light sound of early, wooden-framed pianos with their leather-covered hammers into something clangy and percussive will have been pleasantly surprised by the fine tonal balances of Cole's playing. The most commonly encountered description of these instruments' dryish, harmonically unhaloed treble is "silvery", and it certainly seemed apt to the sounds produced in Sligo over the weekend. Working sensitively with in the dynamic range the piano could comfortably yield not only had the interesting effect of enhancing the apparent richness and volume of the bass but also of making the affinity with a modern piano much more clearly evident than the links with the brighter and often brasher tone of a harpsichord.
The opening programme of piano trios (Haydn, Mozart, Storace and Beethoven), given with violinist Alison Bury and cellist Timothy Merton, was chosen to illustrate the trio as successor to the accompanied keyboard sonata (Haydn's "Gipsy Rondo" Trio), the early trio with fully independent part-writing (Mozart's late Trio in C), and the already developed C minor intensity of early Beethoven (the Trio Op. 1, No. 3); a rarely-heard Trio in D by Englishman Stephen Storace was thrown in for good measure.
The general feeling in this programme was of the keyboard being challenged rather beyond its power, an outcome which, on the principle that musical balancing requires the weakest voice to be accommodated, must be credited to the assertiveness of the two string players. The Beethoven gave the strongest indication of the superb clarity which can be achieved with ease in the lower register of early pianos but replicated only with difficulty on a modern concert grand. It was fascinating through all of the piano events to witness the almost detached quality imparted by the dryness of the treble, a clear reason why legato touch would become such a prized attainment for pianists.
Clarity was again a feature in the solo pieces on Saturday evening, not only in Mozart's Fantasy in D minor but also in the E flat minor Prelude and Fugue from the first book of Bach's "Well-Tempered Clavier", where, clarity or no, the structure of the piece did not hold together really well (at the end of the day, the player counts for so much more than the instrument). Alison Bury, sounding pinched in tone, and using almost continuous if slight vibrato, was the partner in two keyboard and violin sonatas by Mozart, where the balances worked out far more happily than they had in the trios of the previous evening. And, returning to those trios, it would be interesting to know how far back these historically concerned performers can trace the now traditional tempo modifications they adhered to in the "Gipsy Rondo" finale of the Haydn.
Events interspersed around the piano showcases included a lunchtime programme of French baroque music featuring the attractive and agile but not always specifically expressive soprano Meav Ni Mhaolchatha (the highlight here was David Adams's idiosyncratically ruminative delivery of a harpsichord suite by Gaspard Le Roux); a late-night concert by Musica Fabula and friends, mixing styles and periods, from early to contemporary, with an arbitrary abandon which provided great fun for the performers (the style, the time and the lack of heating got the better of me, and I left after an hour); a Sunday lunchtime programme juxtaposing the probably unintentionally stiff-upper-lippish style of The Dublin Viols (who seemed to unbend most in one of Purcell's great Fantazias); and a very mixed bag of local amateur input from the Sligo Early Music Ensemble in arias by Handel and Pasquali from their handlings of the tale of Apollo and Daphne.
