Bantry, Co Cork, Ireland. 4 July 1999 

Festival Director Francis Humphrys and Artistic Director Christopher Marwood have been clever in programming the Fourth West Cork Chamber Music Festival. They pretended it had a contemporary theme--and there was indeed a great many Irish premieres and one world premiere--but loaded the dice by including much music popular with the knowledgeable festival-goer. Consequently the festival has been a financial, popular, trendy and critical success.

Among the living, recently alive and twentieth century composers who pleased or moved us were, in alphabetical order, Tom Ades, Elgar, Dohnanyi, Kodaly (who earned cellist Alban Gerhardt a standing ovation), James MacMillan, Galway's Jane O'Leary, Schnittke, John Tavener, Villa-Lobos, and Belfast's Ian Wilson.

Unfortunately, the star guests, contemporary music specialists the Arditti Quartet, care nothing for audience reaction. They play the difficult and inaccessible, extremely well but irrelevantly, because it is difficult and inaccessible. On Saturday I walked out of their performance after they played a wretched piece by Brian Ferneyhough. They should take a hint from the fact that each of their performances was visibly less well attended than the previous one.

For all except the irredeemably trendy, the festival was an outright triumphal procession for soprano Patricia Rozario, Tavener's favourite. Oddly enough, it was also a triumph for God, as she, Tavener, Macmillian and Wilson are all into spiritual themes. It was a triumph for scene stealers and wits, Tavener and Gerhardt. It was a triumph for the Octuor Paris-Bastille, who were sometimes raw around the edges, but whose enthusiasm and high spirits made them a lot of friends. Violinist Catherine Leonard and violist Danilo Rossi should be invited back as festival workhorses; like Hugh Tinney, they are assets to a festival which throws together so many ad hoc but starred ensembles from world-class soloists.

As always, it was a quiet triumph for the Vanbrugh, who are simply getting better and better. They had a standing ovation on the closing Sunday night for their vivid Brahms Sextet, shared with Rossi and Alban Gerhardt.

My favourite evening was Wednesday, with the Mozart Gran Partita and the Cello Octet, made up to nine cellos when Alban Gerhard played Tavener's Wake up and Die. My favourite single performance of the festival was also on Wednesday, when the Vanbrugh and Rozario rendered Tavener's Voice of an Angel as a tribute for Matt Kingston, a festival benefactor who died.

Taken as a whole, and with the noted exceptions, artistically last year's festival with the Borodin (who will be back for a week in April next year--bookings 027-61576) and Marc-Andre Hamelin was more pleasing to me--and to a large part of the audience. Humphrys, Marwood and their sponsors have demonstrated their cultural courage. Congratulations, gentlemen. Now let's get back to the more rewarding business of having fun with music.

Bantry, Co Cork, Ireland. 2 July 1999

John Tavener believes that Kathleen Raine "stands up for the sacred in art." His setting of her poem The World is a tribute for her 90th birthday. It was commissioned with funds from the British Council for Patricia Rozario and the RTE Vanbrugh String Quarted, who gave the world premiere at Bantry House on Friday night, the key event in the eight days of the West Cork Chamber Music Festival.

Of the world, Raine says:

It burns in the void,
Nothing upholds it
Still it travels.
...
Upheld by stillness.

Tavener's setting is extraordinarily intense, white hot and icy cold. He describes it as "three nodes and a great stillness". He wants it to sound "not human but divine".  A short piece at 12 minutes, it taxes the astounding Rozario and the excellent Vanbrugh to their outer limits. Close your eyes and Tavener through his performers does indeed bring you closer to god. Definitely starred.

At 5pm Dohnanyi's immensely pleasing Sextet, with Chia Chou playing the piano and a selection of the festival's 70 musicians on the other instruments, confirmed him as the master of pizzicato. It was like a circus act, enjoyed by all.

Also on the 8pm programme with the Tavener, the Arditti Quartet played the String Quartet no. 2 by Gyorgi Ligeti (b1923), He's a Hungarian, undoubtedly very clever. The Arditti played it as a choked rage against cultural claustrophobia and even Ligeti's peace as an acidic pocket park in a frenetic cosmopolis. Done that, heard that, moved to the limitlessly green countryside. Next!

Audience opinion differed...

Korngold's Suite for Violins, Cello and Piano Left Hand, opus 23 of 1930 almost purrs in its keenness to please. And please it did in the hands of Catherine Leonard and the Trio Parnassus. I have a good collection of the pieces the onehanded pianist Paul Wittgenstein commissioned from Straus, Britten, Prokofiev, Ravel and others, and this is one of my favourites. Classical rock'n'roll.

Schittke's  String Quartet no. 2  of 1980 is an angry and sad requiem for the  film director Larissa Shepitko, who died in a car accident. Like Schnittke's piano quintet (a requiem for his mother), his second quartet as played by the Arditti will stay in the mind, but is too deeply felt to be heard more often than every few years.

The second starred evening of the Festival, for the Tavener, the Dohnanyi and the Schnittke. 

Bantry, Co Cork, Ireland. 1 July 1999

Took the day off to recharge my emotional batteries. Missed a 100 year wave performance of Kodaly's Sonata for solo cello, opus 8, by Alban Gerhardt accompanied by Hugh Tinney. Standing ovation; can't remember another at these festivals.

Bantry, Co Cork, Ireland. 30 June 1999

Wednesday night at the West Cork Chamber Music Festival was the most successful evening in the entire four years of the Festival. It offered three premieres in the Church of Ireland, Bantry. All five performances were starred.

Patricia Rosario and the RTE Vanbrugh String Quartet gave the Irish premiere of Tavener's Song of the Angel. The correct response to this miniature song with its seemingly single high soprano note, almost sentient in its meaning, is awed silence.

Festival popular favourites, the Octuor Paris Bastille, enlarged with Irish flautists and double-bass, launched straight into such a rabble-rousing, footstomping version of Mozart's Serenade no. 10 in B flat K361, the Gran Partita, that it made Patrick Cohen's sell-out noon pianoforte Mozart concert, itself lively enough to snap a string in the pianoforte, seem almost sedate. Ladies cried. Strong men were moved to smile. Critics overlooked a couple of slightly ragged "cooperations" in the general enthusiam and high spirits of the players. There was a veritable storm of applause, multiple bows, a grand encore.

The Cello Octet provided further almost tactile bliss. Jane O'Leary's Distant Voices, another Irish premiere, conducted by the Vanbrugh second violin, Keith Pascoe, has a totally integrated, almost subliminal celtic theme. Again ladies cried, and paranoid personalities fought against the sly compulsion of O'Leary's music. Her style is still a little fashionably fragmented but in the end it coheres and I for one look forward to her symphonic commission for the NOI.

That would already have made a perfect evening, but there was more. Patricia Rozario gave a thrilling rendition of Villa-Lobos's Bachianas Brasileiras no. 5 for soprano and 8 cellos (1938-1945). The lushly lyrical cello accompaniment contrasted with the higher pure tone of this marvellous singer earned her and them actual footstomping in the applause--in church! This performance by itself amply justifies her inclusion in the festival, regardless of what she does in the Tavener world premiere on Friday.

A ghost walked over our graves as Alban Gerhardt's cello stroked into its long wispy, wistful solo in another Tavener Irish premiere, Wake up and Die. Until it was time for them to come in with a crash, the eight other cellists looked on raptly, clearly much more than the usual courtesy, because Tavener spoke directly to them. A deep piece, resisting instant categorization, it will speak to us still on repeated hearings.

Everyone went home happy, except those who couldn't get even standing-room.

Bantry, Co Cork, Ireland. 29 June 1999

Tuesday noon at the fourth West Cork Chamber Music Festival I missed what was reported to be an excellent concert by Catherine Leonard. But this Festival is so rich that one can take in only so much without suffering emotional burnout.

In the afternoon we watched Joanna MacGregor prepare the piano for her 10.30pm performance of John Cage's Sonatas & Interludes for Prepared Piano. Afterwards she gave a witty talk on Cage. It has always seemed to me that a composer who sticks vibrating gongs under water (Cage, 1937ff) and builds a career out of it has negated the purpose of music. Ms MacGregor does not agree. She makes Cage sound reasonable and sane. Quite a feat for a composer whose best known piece consists of 4 minutes 33 seconds of silence.

At 5pm Patrick Cohen turned up at last, and with Erich Hobarth and Christophe Coin gave elegant performances of Haydn's Keyboard Trio in E flat major and Mozart's Piano Trio in G major K564.

The Fortepiano Trio were joined by Patricia Rozario for nine of Beethoven's Irish & Scottish Folksong Arrangements. She has a very beautiful voice but her folksong style is idiosyncratic, to say the least. However, Rozario's  wispy The Elfin Fairies was a hundred year wave performance.

At 8.30 the Quatuor Mosaiques and Patrick Cohen performed Boccherini's Fortepiano Quintet opus 56 no. 5 in D major. The listener has to be quick because the cosmopolitan Boccherini here plays the musical magpie. This is fundamentally richer music than the salon Haydn and Mozart we heard earlier.

Next the Arditti Quartet harrowed and momentarily moved us, but mostly baffled, with the Officium breve in memoriam Endre Szervansky, opus 28 by Gyorgy Kurtag (born 1926). This is a mini-requiem for the composer Szervansky, somewhat in the style of the miniaturist Anton Webern. This is what minimalism would have sounded like if any of its exponents had any ideas or any talent except for publicity.

Then a starred performance of the festival: the Vanbrugh, with Danilo Rossi as the extra viola, lashed with lush lyricism and rollicking rhythm into Dvorak's String Quintet in E flat major opus 97. They really have turned into marvellous all-rounders.

On at 10.30 to the Cage. Though Cage and MacGregor rattle on about gamelins, I've been to Bali. Good gamelin music has content, not just sound. What this Cage piece actually sounds like is a faux Trinidad steel band, exciting and fun, even occasionally compelling in a bongo-drums sort of way.

But great music? Pull the other one!

Bantry, Co Cork, Ireland. 28 June 1999

On Monday evening at the West Cork Chamber Music Festival in Bantry House, the search was on for the perfect concluding movement.

The three early sets of string quartets Haydn composed after becoming Kapellmeister to the Esterhazy in 1766 culminated in opus 20 in which he essentially solved all but one of the problems of the string quartet.

At 8.30 the Quatuor Mosaiques, early instrument specialists, rendered Haydn's G minor, opus 20 no. 3 with a lovely warm tone.

Next, also at 5pm, they gave a beautifully melodic interpretation of Mozart's A flat major K464. This was the first of six string quartets clearly written in response to Haydn's opus 33, the missing link of the evening (promised but not played), though in this context opus 20 no. 3 contained more useful information for the audience. Wolfgang Mozart, viola, and Joseph Haydn, first violin, played K464 together. Sweet.

Beethoven's A major quartet in his opus 18 set is obviously a homage to K464.

At this point we thus have a mutual admiration society of string quartets with "witty and/or enigmatic" endings, possibly because the composers were searching for a more conclusive way to stop the proceedings.

At 8pm the Arditti Quartet played Beethoven's Grosse Fugue in B flat major opus 133 with great verve. This was the original last movement of Beethoven's opus 130 in B flat, the third of the late quartets. It was declared incomprehensible and unplayable even by Beethoven's friends. Beethoven replaced it in the string quartet, and it is now played as a showpiece in its own right. The Arditti specialize in doing the difficult because it is difficult, and in contemporary music. The Grosse Fugue is the only classical piece in their repertoire, still a hundred years ahead of our time, never mind Beethoven's!

In between all this we heard Janacek's 70th birthday wind sextet celebration of Mladi (Youth) played with such gusto by members of the Octuor Paris-Bastille that the applause lasted  for over five minutes.

At 10.30pm the Mosaiques played Beethoven's String Quartet No. 14 in C sharp minor opus 131--this is the one immediately after the Grosse Fugue debacle!--in a pleasing, intelligent and moving interpretation. The Allegro finale is the perfect final movement at last, at once dramatic and summary, a foretaste of the thunder and lightning which woke the composer from his coma at the moment of his death.

Bantry, Co Cork, Ireland. 27 June 1999

The opening night of the fourth West Cork Chamber Music Festival offered delightful Mozart and moving Schubert bracketing a composer who is alive, only 28 years old, and may well be remembered as long as Mozart and Schubert.

The Octuor Paris-Bastille, superbly pleasing artists, started the evening and the festival off right with Mozart's Serenade for Winds in C minor K388. This is tafelmusik, just a step up from the arrangements of operas for wind instruments a subset of the Court Opera Orchestra in Vienna played to speed the imperial digestion. Much of Mozart's wind writing can be traced to the influence of writing for these exceptionally skilled musicians. Six years later Mozart rescored the wind octet as a string quintet to stand  next to the G minor and C major quintets.

The RTE Vanbrugh Sting Quartet closed the evening with a near-perfect interpretation of Schubert's String Quartet No 14 in D minor D810 "Death and the Maiden". The string quartet gets its nickname from the voice of Death calling enticingly to the audience in the slow movement, which is a rescoring with variations of Schubert's 1817 setting of some pathetic verses by Claudins. It is possibly the finest exemplar of how Schubert's lyrical melodic style is integrated into his encompassing conception of form and executed with unfailing harmonic detail.

The Vanbrugh are chameleons, shaping themselves to whatever music they play. That is very high praise indeed. Tonight they had flashes of the power of the Borodin, who were their guests of honour at last year's festival.

This year's guests of honour, the Arditti String Quartet is an entirely different animal. Though devoted  to a different kind of contemporary music, they insist equally on quality. Thomas Adés, whose Arcadiana op12 of 1994 they played, is a quality composer.

His music needs program notes even fuller than those supplied by festival director Francis Humphrys. I had to rush home and get out a book with a Poussin painting Adés references--and could then clearly hear his music again. His composition does not cohere like those of Schubert or Mozart. He is obsessed with death, offering movements names "tango mortale" and  Lethe.

Still, anyone with enough talent to spend it as extravagantly as Adés is a composer to watch. I'll take bets even this not quite perfect but consistently interesting early piece survives to enter the standard repertoire--and that is the only worthwhile test.

Bantry, Co Cork, Ireland. Programme launch concert. 2 May 1999

On the long ride down the driveway of Bantry House on Sunday night as we left the concert, a huge exploding firework of a Ferris wheel spinning in the temporary fairground on the quay was constantly in our sights. It was an apt metaphor for a mixed evening.

Finghin Collins, probably Irelands best bet among the young pianists, was fresh from his triumphal debut at the Wigmore in London and performing the Beethoven Triple Concerto on RTE last week. He rendered Ferrucio Busonis transcriptions for piano of organ chorales by J. S. Bach most entertainingly.

Bach wrote this music first for chamber orchestra and voices in cantatas, then lifted the best tunes and transcribed them for organ. A hundred-odd years later Busoni, a virtuoso pianist of intellectual bent, looking for compositions to show off both his keyboard skill and the quality of his mind, transposed them for piano.

But, third-hand or not, any three pieces which include Nun komm, der Heiden Heiland must move an audience. Collins has a nice touch, excellent dynamics, and is not lacking in confidence. He gave us a great start to the evening.

The Young Musicians Trio, consisting of Nicola Sweeney on violin, Midori Tamura on piano, and cellist Harriet Wiltshire, then rendered Mendelssohns Piano Trio No 1 in D minor opus 49.

It is a mistake to consider Mendelssohn a lightweight without depth.

These three are fine musicians who will probably go far. Their first Molto allegro ed agitato movement, while no doubt metronomically true, lacked the agitato of conviction, the certainty and confidence, earned by experience, which leads one that much closer to the line between persuasion and excess.

By the brilliant Scherzo they had long since gained their footing. In the Andante they interpreted the few dark tones Mendelssohn permitted himself with entirely appropriate passion.

The cellist Wiltshire had several spectacular moments. One to watch.

Shostakovich is enigmatic. It is part of his abiding appeal to audiences. His Piano Quintet in G minor opus 57 dates from 1940. What I think of as his frightened period started in 1936 with a vicious attack on his music in Pravda, the cancellation of the premiere of his Fourth Symphony, and early in 1937 a terrifying visit to the NKVD, the Russian secret police, at their Lubyanka headquarters.

After that Shostakovich bent the knee, writing Soviet music, as in his spectacularly successsful Fifth Symphony. But he may also have carried on musical guerilla warfare, of which the Piano Quintet would then be a prime example. If he were not Shostakovich, one might describe it as a musical  fit of childish pique. But he was Shostakovich, and all around him people were being shot for less. We should take the threat, the fear, and the result seriously.

One could pick a few soaring passages from this infuriating quintet and demonstrate why Shostakovich deserves to stand next to Beethoven. One could equally pick a few wretched impositions on the audience, particularly from the barbarous Scherzo, and demonstrate why Shostakovich isnt even good enough to write propagandist film scores--which he did to put bread on the table during this dangerous period. The mock fairground music with its mindlessly driven ostinato rhythm does not belong in a concert hall.

No one will ever know whether Shostakovich was committing willful pastiche, an act of malicious musical resistance. All we have is the music of the quintet, which speaks no thousands words, nor even a single picture.

If we, with all our liberal culture and knowledge, do not know what to make of Shostakovichs quintet, pity the poor uncouth dictator he mocked! If he did, of course.

In the face of these uncertainties of the composer's intentions, the RTE Vanbrugh Quartet and Finghin Collins gave a wonderfully confident interpretation, no doubt inspired by hearing so much Shostakovich played at last years Festival by the acknowledged Shostakovich experts, the Borodin Quartet. Collins fit in seamlessly with his seniors, and the Vanbrugh appear to be at the beginning of a grand musical maturity that we pray will last forty years. They are honesty very, very good indeed. They earned their long and loud applause by the quality of the perfomance.

But their choice of this particular Shostakovich composition to launch the festival is fairground showmanship, doing something difficult and dangerous because it is there to be done.

The Ferris wheel was the perfect coda to the Vanbrughs musical trapeze act.