Thursday's opening concert at the West Cork Chamber Music Festival was devoted to music for the Hungarian dulcimer, the cimbalom. The sound of this instrument is probably better known than its name - you can hear it in Kodaly's Hary Janos Suite, and imitations of it are to be found in many Hungarian works.
In the Gobelin drawing room of Bantry House it sounded startlingly loud in the hands of Ildiko Vekony, the two slender beaters in her hands and the small case of the instrument seeming hardly sufficient to explain the volume.
She used a cimbalom equipped with a sustaining pedal like the piano's, enabling her to play her own arrangement of a CPE Bach Fantasy, some movements from JS Bach's G minor Sonata for solo violin, and Dunstable's Sub tuam protectionem, as well as a selection of pieces by living Hungarian composers.
Unlike the vibraphone or marimba, which can manage four-note chords, the cimbalom only rises to two notes at a time, anything greater requiring arpeggiation. Ms Vekony's agility in masking this limitation was remarkable, as, indeed, was the range of different sounds she was able to produce. The most persuasive of the recent pieces was in many ways the most conservative, Laszl o Sary's Slow and Brisk.
At the other end of the day, at St Brendan's Church, the Dutch soprano Charlotte Riedijk undertook Messian's great song-cycle, Harawi in partnership with pianist Joanna MacGregor. There's no room for compromise in Messiaen's surreal vision of sexual longing, and there was none in the performance by Riedijk and MacGregor, musicians with fire in their bellies, who made Harawi sound the purest, most concentrated, and most compelling of all the remarkable works the composer produced in the 1940s.
Earlier in the day, viol players Laurence Dreyfus and Marku Luolaja-Mikkola with lutenist Thomas Boysen played an all-French programme which peaked in wonderfully elaborate pieces by Forqueray and Marais. The Ensemble Paris-Bastille brought smiles of delight in Mozart's Serenade in E flat, K475.
The Dominant String Quartet played the strangely distended Second Quartet of 1980 by Russian composer Yuri Boutsko, who seems to want to work his material in the manner of Janacek, but without the necessary tension or quality of material. And the RTE Vanbrugh Quartet were joined by viola-player James Boyd for a pleasing performance of Beethoven's String Quintet in C, Op. 29, which really took flight in the finale.
