Bantry, Co Cork, Ireland. 7 July 1997

The second West Cork Chamber Music Festival delivered on the promise of the first, and almost daily paid big bonuses. Highlights:

Zeroes of the festival

--Joe Mulholland of RTE, for rambling about his trouble with the unions, holding up the start of the music for half an hour

--People who, after they had repeatedly been warned to book, turned up without tickets to performances already crammed to standing room

Heroes of the festival

--the venue, Bantry House, for being beautiful beyond all description

--the audiences, for being a right sophisticated bunch

--the performers, for mixing in the friendliest, most accessible possible fashion with their audiences

--Festival Director Francis Humphrys and Artistic Director Christopher Marwood, for putting it on, and for taking risks like the Messiaen and bringing two premieres to the festival

--Ian Wilson for composing the most meaningful string quartet premiere at the festival

--John Tavener, for making the women cry with his world premiere string quartet Diodia

--the administrative, ticketing, catering, parking and general factotum staffs for never failing to smile under pressure

--Rudolf Jansen, master accompanist, who faded into the wallpaper to let his singers shine

--Joanna MacGregor, all-round soloist and ensemble player

--Steven Doane, all-round soloist and ensemble player

--Romain Guyot and Anthony Marwood, veterans of the first festival, returned to give more pleasure

--the Chilingirian Quartet, profoundly professional, willing to work well with everyone

--the Vanbrugh Quartet, perfect hosts

--the star guests who so willingly submerged their egos into the many ad hoc ensembles for such stunning results

Double heroes of the festival

--RTE for taping several 100 year-wave performances that would otherwise be lost: 'We tape everything at the festival.'--Simon Taylor, Head of Music, RTE

--Brigitte and Egerton Shelswell White for once again opening their great house so that chamber music may be played in the most suitable (and elegant) surroundings

--Chilingirian's Philip De Groote for never once grimacing while playing a drone on his cello for 45 minutes in Tavener's Diodia

Most heroic performances of the festival

--Shostakovich 2nd Piano Trio by Anthony Marwood (brother of the festival's artistic director), Steven Doane, Joanna MacGregor

--Schubert's Winterreise by Stephan Genz

--Ian Wilson's 3rd String Quartet, 'Towards the far country'. premiered by the RTE Vanbrugh String Quartet

--Messiaen's Vingt Regards sur L'Enfant Jesus (excepts) by Joanna MacGregor

--Schubert's Octet, by the Chilingirian with Romain Guyot, Stephen Stirling, Julie Price and Duncan McTier

Least heroic anecdote of the festival

Jute: I've known about the Chilingirian for twenty-five years, but you look too young. Did you inherit the string quartet from your dad?

Several festival staff: (Sharp intake of breath)

Levon Chilingirian: No, I founded the quartet. But we were so green that at our first engagement, at the Tate Gallery, we went in through the front door. Some PR woman who was supposed to look after us told us, 'Musicians use the tradesmen's entrance!' (Laughter) That's not all. They had allocated us one complimentary ticket. So I asked if I could have it, to give to my wife. 'Absolutely not,' snapped the woman, 'the ticket is for the elderly, distinguished Mr Chilingirian.'

Most depressing quote of the festival

--Heard on the third of the eight days of the festival: 'People will use the extraordinary success of this year's festival to predict that next year's cannot possibly as good.' (Name and address withheld in the interest of public order)

Most relevant quote of the festival

--'Let's go get a drink to drown our sorrows because we shall never play that well.'

Footwear of the festival, headed back to the drama coach

--Levon Chilingirian of guess who, footstomping

--Gregory Ellis of the Vanbrugh, footfiddling

Next year's festival

--Russian theme

--Guest quartet: the Borodin

--Artistic expectation: extremely high

--Most urgent requirement: a female singer to match the quality of the

 

Bantry, Co Cork, Ireland. 6 July 1997

Sunday, the last night of the night of the West Cork Chamber Music Festival, provided a widely varied display of ensembles made up from the star guests and groups at the Festival, playing compositions hardly ever heard short of London.

The evening swung into instant action with a rather full concert at 5pm, when violist Roberto Diaz and and pianist Hugh Tinney played Schubert's Arpeggione Sonata absolutely thrillingly, perfectly in balance.

This was followed by Bottesini's Capriccio di Bravura, by double bassist Duncan McTier and Tinney. The performance was exactly as the name describes, bravura, with double bassist and pianist picking up the baton in relays. It is wonderfully colourful music and the double bass is an instrument too rarely heard.

The concert finished with Kodaly's Duo Sonata, by violinist Anthony Marwood and cellist Steven Doane, whose talents, remarked on here several times over the week, need no repeating. This was another bravura performance but the composition itself is too long and misshapen, coming to a whole row of exciting climaxes, each a natural stopping place, and then picking up again while members of the audience wondered if the Bantry restaurants would hold their tables for dinner.

Each of these three performances would by stand by itself as an extremely satisfactory, heartwarming, end to any evening out. Three together is an excess of wealth. Each earned huge applause for its fireworks.

The 8.30 concert opened with Schubert's showpiece Octet in F major, D803. It was performed with evident gusto and enjoyment by the Chilingirian Quartet, joined by hornplayer Stephen Stirling, bassoonist Julie Price, McTier, and clarinettist Romain Guyot. The piece is wonderful, the ensemble work was wonderful, and it all worked so well I wondered when the brass band would march in to join the fun. Though the composer gives everyone a go (except the horn player, who is comparatively shortchanged), in many sense this is a clarinet concerto with very strong string and wind support, and Guyot, who is quite brilliant and very mature already, was carried forward and upward on the good wishes of his fellow conspirators. This performance caused a lot of smiles and a long storm of footstamping approval.

The RTE Vanbrugh String Quartet, the hosts, joined by cellist Philip De Groote and violist Asdis Valdimardottir from the guest quartet, the Chilingirian, then closed the proceedings with Brahms' String Sextet in B flat, op18. This is a thoughtful piece, just the meat for the Vanbrugh at their most earnestly reflective. It has its fiery moments, of course, but it was in the quieter passages, turning it over with the Schubert octet in my mind, not to mention the Taverner and Messiaen compositions at the edge of divinity we had heard earlier in week, that I wondered if the mathematician is not closer to the mind of god than the disappointed lover. The end was rousing, a fitting finish to a truly outstanding festival. 

 

Bantry, Co Cork, Ireland. 5 July 1997

Saturday was another red-letter day at the West Cork Chamber Music Festival, when at the 10.30pm concert Joanna MacGregor played a selection from Olivier Messiaen's Vingt Regards sur L'Enfant Jesus. She gave an intelligent introduction explaining why she had chosen that hour's worth of pieces from the two and a half hours of the complete work. One might argue the choice of pieces but a better balance could not be achieved, as she promptly demonstrated with a performance that gave us lullabies, bird movement and song, the fluttering of angels' wings, and the full colour of this extraordinary composition, opening and closing with a meditation on the nature of god in F sharp major, the most important key in Olivier Messiaen's oevre.

Vingt Regards is the most important piano composition of our century, and MacGregor is the most convincing Messiaen interpreter now working. Her opening and closing selection, and her manner of playing, reminded me of the words of the poet and novelist John Wain, substituting in his original only 'composition' for 'poem': 'A composition about the relationship of the human and the divine is a composition about life itself, about the nature of life, the essence of life, the energies of life. About what form it takes, what form it ought to take, whether it's something out there separate from ourselves or something that flows through us and we share it with the gods...'

Earlier, at the 8.30pm concert, Joanna MacGregor had joined the excellent Chilingirian Quartet for a grand rendition of Shostakovich's Piano Quintet. This concert was rounded out by a lovely Brahms Third Piano Quartet performed by another of those serendipidous ad hoc combinations of players so characterististic of this festival: Anthony Marwood, Roberto Diaz, Steven Doane and Susan Tomes. In the roundly balanced performance I found the statement of the theme in the cello solo truly moving.

Either performance on its own would have made my day in Bantry.

The 5.30pm concert was the Young Musicians' Platform. First Nicky Sweeney, Cian O'Duill, and Gerald Peregrine played Beethoven's Second String Trio very convincingly and enjoyably. It is music well within their grasp, they worked extremely well as an ensemble, and they started right off in the style in which they intended to finish.

The other performance in the Young Musicians' Platform, of Brahms's First Piano Trio by Catherine Leonard, Finghin Collins and Hanno Strydom, was not such an unmixed blessing. They started nervously, with several tiresome minutes of tuning up, and did not get their act together until well into the first movement. Throughout we heard soloists' egos competing between Leonard and Collins, with Strydom's cello holding the ring. This is not the natural order of things. The piece is also too big and deep for their experience, if not their technique: a few tempi were unsteady but forgiven in return for the fire with which they played. Nonetheless they had a rousing finish, and the piece as a whole succeeded.

In a festival with such an unrelenting span of firstrate talent, where audiences and critics are forced by comparison, no matter how invidious, to make no allowance for the unready, those who push for jobs for Irish boys and girls at Irish venues run the serious risk of pushing the boat out before it is finished and thereby sinking it. On Friday night their policy had a narrow escape.

 

Bantry, Co Cork, Ireland. 3 July 1997

Ian Wilson is a 32 year-old Belfast composer who, against the grain of modern composers, is fairly prolific. His third string quartet, given its Irish premiere on Thursday night by the RTE Vanbrugh String Quartet for whom it was written, is named 'Towards a far country'. It finds its 'impetus in two sources...the work of the artist Paul Klee, in whose paintings I saw inspiration for musical ideas: and...the idea of a journey, one which actually ends up as a spiritual voyage through life and death.' So says the composer.

The idea of Klee's paintings having anything at all to do with the layered emotional depth of Wilson's music can be discounted in the mind of listeners, though not in the mind of the composer. Such closures of the mind baffle psychologists, not least because of their intense individuality. The idea of a journey into the resources of the spirit is a pretty common one in music. Just two nights before we had heard in the same Bantry House library Tavener's version in the world premiere of the string quartet Diodia, and the previous evening at Abbeystrewry Church in Skibbereen we heard Taverner's Ikon of Light, which too can shorthanded as a spiritual journey towards enlightenment.

Wilson's quartet is more successful than Tavener's. It takes fewer risks, is more concise, better integrated and is emotionally richer, partly because the appeal to the emotions is less blatant and therefore more lasting.

The test of new music is not how many critics love it (or hate it, if one is a modern composer perversely seeking justification in the rejection of the barbarians at the gate). The true test is whether in fifty years or a hundred audiences will pay to hear it. I would take a bet on this one surviving.

If one adds up all the Schubert Trout Quintets I have listened to in concert halls, in the homes of friends and on disc, it has taken something over four months of my life. It is time to let go before it becomes wallpaper, like pop music. The other half of Thursday's 8.30pm programme was a most elegant Trout, a suitable high point to call a halt to further Trouts for me. It was given by Anthony Marwood, Roberto Diaz, Steven Doane, Duncan McTier and Joanna McGregor. A grand ensemble. This is the first Trout McGregor has performed, and confirms what an excellent pianist she is.

At the 10.30 performance Romain Guyot, paying a return visit to the West Cork Chamber Music Festival, joined the Vanbrugh for Brahms's Clarinet Quintet in B minor, op115. The Vanbrugh were at their best, very spirited, but Guyot amazed with a truly mature rendition for one so young. The audience left smiling and I was glad I had stayed to be uplifted. These late night concerts are an unbelievable bargain at only £5 for the best seats to hear world-class musicians.

 

Skibbereen, Co Cork, Ireland. 2 July 1997

Abbeystrewry Church, Skibbereen, does not have wonderful acoustics but it is superior to the two Dublin cathedrals, which are known for their poor acoustics. On Wednesday night, for the only concert of the West Cork Chamber Music Festival given outside Bantry, the Choir of Christ Church Cathedral, Dublin, under Mark Duley, opened with Missa o Soberana Luz by Filipe de Magalhaes (c1571-1652).

Duley chose it because it was the only composition remotely suitable with 'light' in the title to accompany the main feature, John Tavener's 1984 composition Ikon of Light. Felicitously, the Magalhaes mass also has a phrase which in inverted form matches one that is a main bulwark of the Tavener piece. Neat!

The choice is serendipidous in other ways. Magalhaes was, like the better known Cardos and Lobo, trained by Manuel Mendes at Evora Cathedral. He may never be standard repertoire, as they are, but it is nice to meet him. He is brief where they are expansive, at times almost abrupt in the modern manner.

In fact, Magalhaes's mass makes Tavener's Ikon, which always leaves one wanting more, thinking it ends too soon, seem almost expansive.

It is tempting to contast the tight conceptual unity of Tavener's Ikon with his self-indulgent Diodia, premiered the previous evening, but this excellent performance of Ikon has put me in too good a mood to indulge in sniping at old news.

Duley's choir is well-regulated machine which, like the best of the soloists, always make it seem so easy anyone can do it; they must work incredibly hard behind closed doors.

The members of the Chilingirian making up the string trio--a step up in the world for the Christchurch Choir, singing with the Chili!-- made it quite clear with their instruments that every device has its purpose in the Ikon, and none could removed without damaging its structural integrity. Necessity too is the mother or art. In Ikon nothing is wasted.

Ikon is very definitely contemporary music but I imagine that at any time over the past half-millennium or so it could have been played in any church and applauded for its sincerity and its deeply moving but non-specific force. Mystics have been trying to explain the experience of approaching god since men could speak and music still does it best-- and no composer of the last century does it better than Tavener.

If you missed this fine Ikon live, try the version by the Tallis Scholars on CD (Gimell).

 

Bantry, Co Cork, Ireland. 1 July 1997

It is quite extraordinary. Earlier on Tuesday evening discerning women were crying with the emotion engendered by the world premiere of the new John Tavener string quartet, Diodia.

And at the 10.30pm concert afterward the even more discerning of both sexes had tears in their eyes for the masterful performance of Die Winterreise by Stephan Genz.

All of this following on the stunning Shostakovich piano trio on Monday night.

Stephan Genz's performance of Die Winterreise generated an awed pause after he stopped singing in which I counted by thousands to thirty. That's half a minute of respectful silence for talent and emotion. All else that needs to be said about this very young baritone is that the very large boots left vacant by his teacher, Fischer-Dieskau, are no longer empty. If you didn't catch him in Bantry, buy a CD (Hyperion label) and catch up.

Stephan Genz made my Tuesday in Bantry a red-letter day.

John Tavener's Diodia was co-commissioned by the West Cork Chamber Music Festival and RTE FM3. The Chilingirian is a profoundly professional string quartet but Tavener made its cellist, Philip De Groote, play a mindnumbing drone throughout. The drone is Tavener's Byzantine or Eastern connection but better used in the work of Hildegard von Bingen or in recordings by Sister Marie Keyrouz of Chants Byzantin. The drone is probably what resonates so much better with women than men. Perhaps the other men counted how many times Tavener repeated his theme-- seven times by my count but I may have dozed off-- without overly much in the way of binding, and wondered about creative value for creative money. There are the usual simplistic flower-child devices, like knocking with the knuckles on the viola. In fact, this composition has most of the devices of the Shostakovich 2nd Piano Trio we heard so well on Monday, but without the meaning and the integration. What puts it quite over the top is the viola-player Asdis Valdimarsdottir being made repeatedly to intone, 'Remember me' at the end, before the final ghostly (ghastly?) knocking on the wood.

Tavener himself describes the new quartet as 'an existential journey...that passes through incidents but leads nowhere.' Quite.

The question remains, is the new Tavener interesting--he is after all a fascinating if occasionally infuriating composer--or merely interminable? Why don't composers have editors like novelists do? It really does seem to me that Tavener needs only to murder a few dozen darlings in order to release a possibly fine thin quartet from the pretentious fatarsed one imprisoning it.

Your mileage may differ. The wide-eyed young may delight in Diodia's portentious vapours. Women may resonate catharsically to the drones and the sentimentality-with-added-sugar of 'Remember me.' Me? I am left dryeyed and wondering yawningly whether my education does not fit me for something better than counting Tavener's repetitions.

 

Bantry, Co Cork, Ireland. 30 June 1997

On this night I heard the starred performance of the West Cork Chamber Music Festival. The organisers should have reserved it proms-style for the last night but they didn't know either that synergy would create critical mass. It happened in the Shostakovich Piano Trio No. 2, opus 67.

You can put the stars together and get sizzle, frizzle or flame-out. Sometimes you get synergy. Sometimes the synergy goes nuclear. On Monday night it did.

Cellist Steven Doane says, "We rehearsed a fortnight ago in London and again this afternoon. I'd played with Anthony before, but I'd never even met Joanna." Anthony Marwood is the violinist, Joanna McGregor the pianist. Festival Director Francis Humphreys claims they rehearsed three times...

A starred performance is the one people will talk about years afterwards. It doesn't happen at every festival, perhaps once in a year, somewhere in the world. From the first weirdly doomladen opening notes the audience knew that something special was sparking. The violent movements are as much performance art as music. I'm not suggesting any old ensemble could handle it, yet this scratch group did it brilliantly, laying the composer's intention open to the audience.

Shostakovich's music paints a thousand words. Poet Michael Longley sat onstage looking bemused at the power of the music to conjure up images. His poems, read between movements, are as literature superior to Heaney's (Heaney last year read a whole book of poems!), more relevant, shorter, and he reads better, but who needs the music explained? I don't think I'll go to another performance that mixes poetry and music, even at the risk of missing a starred performance.

After the silence descended again, someone opined loudly that they would never again match that performance. But not to worry. "We have it on tape for posterity," Simon Taylor of RTE said. "We record everything at this Festival." I imagine that we shall hear this performance many times in the future and that, if contractual obligations can be sorted out, it will eventually be available on CD and become a reference performance. God bless RTE.

At the same performance mezzo-soprano Christa Pfeiler, accompanied by the marvellously sensitive Rudolf Jansen, sang a selection of Mendelssohn Lieder that suits her dramatically expressive style, especially the rousing Suleika (op57/3) and the affecting Nachtlied (op71/6).

At the 10.30pm concert a full house turned out for Mendelssohn's String Octet in E major, opus 20, played by the unique combination of the Chilingirian Quartet and the Vanbrugh String Quartet. More synergy!

Pity so few tickets are left because gems like this will abound in the rest of the Festival if the first two days are a guide. But even the cheap tickets remaining are very good value. For the 10.30pm concert I sat right at the back in the cheapest seats and heard every note; the acoustics at Bantry House are truly marvellous.

 

Bantry, Co Cork, Ireland. 29 June 1997

Last night the second West Cork Chamber Music Festival opened thrillingly in Bantry House with a programme so electrifying that one wonders if any festival can possibly keep up this extraordinary level of energy.

The Cork-based RTE Vanbrugh String Quartet are the hosts to all the other artists. The Vanbrugh opened the proceedings in their usual rousing style with perhaps the greatest of all Schubert's string quartets, the G major D887. With its tripping dances contrasted against the dark night of the soul into which Schubert was descending as he wrote his last string quartet, it seems almost tailormade to display the Vanbrugh's dynamism.

Mezzo Christa Pfeiler, accompanied by Rudolf Jansen on the Steinway grand piano from Jeffers, and Roberto Diaz on the viola, sang Brahm's Lieder opus 91, numbers 1 and 2. The cradle song was written for the firstborn of Brahms's friend the spectacular violinist Joseph Joachim and the mezzo Annelie Weiss. The other song was written as a peace offering after Brahms told a divorce court there was no cause for Joachim's insane jealousy of Annelie. Pfeiler's big round voice is good with this music, treating it with humour as well as good taste.

Then baritone Stephan Genz, also accompanied by Rudolf Jansen, changed the pace with a powerful rendition of five Lieder from Brahms's nine settings in 1864 of poems by Platen and Daumer. These songs progressively paint a moving picture of a wasted life caused by an unfulfilled love. The parallel with Brahms's unrequited love for the virtuoso pianist Clara Schumann is inescapable. Genz has the power, the technique and the emotional control required for these dramatic songs.

The music came a full circle when the Chilingirian Quartet, joined by Simon Aspell's viola, played Mendelssohn's String Quintet in B flat, opus 87. Where the Mendelssohnian touch is light, it seemed to have been prefigured earlier in the Vanbrugh Schubert, especially in the Scherzo of the Schubert piece. The Chilingirian is a marvellously competent and confident. They gave a very precise, very lively demonstration of why Mendelssohn should be so popular.

One of the best things of a festival like this one is the unexpected combinations of artists sparking off each other.

I can't wait for the rest of these concerts!