When Zoltan Kodaly wrote his Sonata for solo cello in 1915 he broached a gap of almost 200 years, by producing the first such piece worthy of comparison with the solo cello suites of Bach.
Thursday's concerts at the West Cork Chamber Music Festival drove the point home, by programming two of Bach's suites at midday and the Kodaly in the 5p.m. slot.
Christophe Coin gave well-groomed accounts of Bach's highly-contrasted Second and Third Suites.
Alban Gerhardt convincingly searched out the drama, song and virtuosity of the Kodaly with a large-scale cogency of view, rhythmic rigour and emotional clout that quite simply brought the house down.
He was partnered in Beethoven's A major Cello Sonata by Hugh Tinney, in a performance that was classicallyturned and finely-balanced (though not always ideally tight in ensemble), and served as an imaginative foil to the wilder excursions of the Kodaly. Tinney later joined with the RTE Vanbrugh Quartet in Elgar's late Piano Quintet.
The performance suggested the players agreed with the composer's own modest assessment of the piece: "It does not carry us any further, but it is full of golden sounds and I like it. But you must not expect anything violently chromatic or cubist." The equable give and take of the playing came as a major relief after the gruelling, self-defeating intensity of Trio Parnassus in Smetana's Piano Trio in G minor.
This group's playing was so over-the-top in brutality of attack, that one was left reeling and numbed by the insensitivity of the battering.
It was unfortunate that their late night concert featured the longest possible version of Schubert's Trio in E flat.
The players did pull in their horns a bit in this work, but the hard edges of the playing and the shortage of graceful contouring were ultimately fatiguing.
