Bantry, Co Cork, Ireland. 5 July 1998

On Sunday night the Borodin String Quartet, with Simon Aspell and Christopher Marwood, closed the third, and best ever, West Cork Chamber Music Festival with a bang, playing Tchaikovsky's String Sextet opus 70--the Souvenir de Florence--with verve, style and obvious enjoyment exceeded only by that of the audience.

The audience had been warmed up by the Festival's other superstar, Marc-Andre Hamelin and the festival's genial and very talented hosts, the RTE Vanbrugh String Quartet, in a performance of Dvorak's Piano Quintet opus 81 that was exquisitely pleasing from beginning to end. The man is just magical: he never puts a finger wrong.

At 5pm we had heard the Young Musicians' Platform of two string quartets of which the second quartet, Catherine Leonard, Nicky Sweeney, Cian O'Duill and Hanno Strydom, adventurously chose to play a Shostakovich quartet--in a Festival featuring the Borodin, the world's premier Shostakovich interpreters. They chose no 8, written as the composer's own memorial, and accounted for it well. Interestingly, Valentin Berlinsky, cellist of the Borodin, came to hear Strydom's cello. Hmm.

Altogether a most satisfactory and successful festival in, we must not forget, the grand home of Egerton and Brigitte Shelswell White. Congratulations to them, to Festival Director Francis Humphrys, Artistic Director Christopher Marwood, to the Vanbrugh (among other hostly duties for lifting their own performances onto a new peak) and to the staff for running a major international event so smoothly.

The international audience was sent home purring with pleasure like cats who discovered the key to the creamery. The last fabulous concert set the seal on what seems to be permanent success. Once could be happenstance, twice could be luck but three times in a row is good taste and good management.

Those who couldn't get tickets need not go unsatisfied. All performances were recorded for radio for broadcasting on FM3 in Ireland,  through the European Broadcasting Union, and elsewhere whenever you can persuade your local broadcasters to put them on; several were recorded for future television transmission.
 

Bantry, Co Cork, Ireland. 4 July 1998

Saturday night was Jesus Night at the West Cork Chamber Music Festival. First we heard Ian Wilson's The Seven Last Words, which is his second piano trio, played by Joanna MacGregor on the piano, Ida Levin on the violin, and Anne Gastinel on the cello.

Wilson himself says he owes his inspiration to Haydn more than to the texts from the Apostles Mathew, Luke and John. To me it sounded the other way round. This is fine, moving music, with flowing invention and quick, quirky melodious passages, played with great sensitivity by the ensemble.

John Tavener is a well-known Jesus freak; he even looks like a carpenter who has fallen out with his barber. I'm a big fan of his work but he is an infuriatingly inconsistent composer. As for the poet Anna Ahkmatova, she verges on self-pity too often for me, though with a lot more reason than feminist icons like Sylvia Plath. But together they are catalytic, and if one adds the precision instrument that is the voice of Juanita Lascarro and the here appropriately tense cello of Anne Gastinel to the mix, the Ahkmatova settings Tavener composed in 1993 come off brilliantly.

Lascarro told me that her favourite is Richard Strauss. Hint to the organizers: invite her back with at least one Strauss night in her programme. Strauss wrote some fine material that is not heard often enough.

After that Marc-Andre Hamelin, the Festival's all-purpose superstar, and the Leopold String Trio treated us to a sterling version of Faure's Piano Quartet No 1 in C minor, opus 15 of 1879. He is a magic pianist and, more, an inspiring ensemble player. I was not the only one impressed with Hamelin's ability to blend in with any ensemble the festival could throw up; there was a good deal of comment from public and performers on his humility and willingness to take on anything, a commodiousness of spirit often sadly lacking in performers of far lesser ability. The Scherzo was particularly fine.

The Leopold, which I heard for the first time in the festival, look like they are just leaving high school for the conserve but they play with the quiet, smooth confidence of old hands.

I did not stay for the 10.30 Borodin concert, leaving my seats for a couple who arrived without a booking. There is such a thing as emotional overload, and I really did not feel like Shostakovich's searing last string quartet played by candlelight. One can only laugh and cry so often in one week before the emotions start to jumble.

Others too had told me they were picking one or two performances a day to give them emotional and intellectual space to digest and envelop what they heard.

My god! Listen to that! Who in Bantry, indeed in Ireland outside perhaps Dublin, would ten years ago--even five years ago, voluntarily have missed out on the Borodin playing Shostakovich because the had already heard enough good music?

That is the measure of the riches on offer at the West Cork Chamber Music Festival.
 

Bantry, Co Cork, Ireland. 3 July 1998

Friday 3 July 1998 was the best day ever at the West Cork Chamber Music Festival, and that is really saying something.

A case can be made for Prokofiev and Rachmaninov as the Last Romantics. Anne Gastinel on the cello and Hugh Tinney on the piano at the 5pm performance made exactly this romantic case in Prokofiev's Sonato for Cello and Piano opus 119 of 1949, and Rachmaninov's Sonata for Cello and Piano opus 19 of 1901.

There is much in the writing to demand a virtuoso performance, but also much that is light and lyrical. How Prokofiev, who had just been denied an audience for his life's work by the Zdanov Decree could write something so life-affirming beggars the belief of some commentators, but then again, why not? The alternative, bitterness, scarred the soul of Shostakovich, who was also banned.

The 8.30 performance opened with Debussy's Sonata for Flute, Viola and Harp of 1915. The composer himself said that this was music composed for no other purpose than to have pleasing music. William Dowdall on the flute, Yuko Inoue on the violin, and Andrea Malir on the harp did exactly that: they pleased. Come again, friends!

As if that was not enough, the next item was Mozart's Quintet for Piano, Oboe, Clarinet, Horn and Bassoon in E flat K452 from his annus mirabilus, 1784, with Marc-Andre Hamelin playing the piano, Stephen Stirling the horn, Matthew Manning the oboe, John Finucane the clarinet and Julie Price the bassoon.

It was another of those marriages made in heaven, an ensemble made possible only by the circumstances of the festival. Manning told me they did not need much rehearsal. But then why should they? Professional performers either hate the K452 because they are snobs and everyone else loves it, or they love it intimately because it is truly great music regardless of the fact that the public loves it. We could hear that these performers love it intimately even as they confirmed the predilection of those of us who would chose K452  as our desert island companion.

Interestingly, I asked others in the official music coral of the front rows what they would choose, and K452 got equal votes with Schubert's piano quintet (my second choice) and Beethoven's 7th symphony (I would choose the Pastorale if it had to be Beethoven but otherwise a few songs by Hildegard of Bingen would take third place for me).

After this we heard Alfred Schnittke's Piano Quintet, composed between 1972 and 1976. Schnittke was born in 1934 and is now incapacitated by a stroke and unable to compose. That is a great pity.

His Piano Quintet was composed in response to the death of his mother. One is tempted to draw comparisons with the Brahms piano trio but that is a false trail, except in depth of feeling. The true comparison is with Raymond Dean's Brown Studies, of which we heard the world premiere the evening before. Schnittke uses many of the same devices as Dean but he has themes and he gives them coherence. Above all, Schnittke has an idea, and emotion, and passion, and a respect for communicating with his audience.

Joanna MacGregor and the Vanbrugh String Quartet rendered it unadorned and unexpurgated, with the passion not bowdlerised one whit, to live in the memory for a very long time indeed. The elegiac passion, the pain indeed, is too great to want to hear this piece more than once a year or every few years, and one suspects it is not easy on the performers either, but it is utterly safe to forecast it will enter the repertoire and become a standard.

MacGregor at 10.30 gave a performance of Bach's Art of the Fugue that sometimes sounded a bit pacey, though at other times she observed the slower passages with her usual punctilio and control, particularly meet in what is after all a set of exercises for pianists, and given in an audience that contained both star and novice pianists. Here there were not the stunning insights of her Messiaen at the same festival a year before, or in the Schnittke only half an hour before. But what does one expect in finger exercises, however interesting they may be? It was light entertainment, of an elevated standard, true, by a pianist who, even wrung out by the Schnittke, is never dull.

When MacGregor matures, she will do the Art of the Fugue as well as my favourite performer of it, Tatiana Nikolayeva. You can compare their versions on record, MacGregor on Collins, Nikolayeva on Hyperion.

I also heard that MacGregor's masterclass was enlivened by a somewhat cutting wit. For me that snippet rounded out the most fabulous of many good days at the West Cork Chamber Music Festival these three years.
 

Bantry, Co Cork, Ireland. 2 July 1998

The world premiere of Raymond Dean's Brown Studies was given Thursday night at the West Cork Chamber Music Festival by the Vanbrugh String Quartet.

The Vanbrugh commissioned it with funds from An Chomhairle Ealaion. They did their dough.

The Vanbrugh did their best with it but the piece has no coherence, indeed Dean's own programme notes tries valiantly to make that absence its very virtue. Nonsense.

It is one of those compositions which trendies will love on 'studying the score' but that only the pretentiously 'artistic' will be able to bear hearing more than once. It displays all the tricks in Dean's bag, and that is all it does. It is destroyed by its fractional self-references. It harasses its audience with instruments 'progressively losing tone as they drop out' (Dean himself). It is an arrogant presumption on our time, a waste of the talents of the Vanbrugh.

After the interval, Theo Dorgan read a poem. His poem was good and not too long, and he reads better than any poet the Festival has seen, but it is still not clever to have performers sitting there waiting for a poet to finish.

The Brahms Trio for piano, horn and violin, with Marc-Andre Hamelin, Stphen Stirling and Levin, was a delight.

Hamelin's skill and passionate style we have already commented on. Levin has great feeling, a talent making her violin sing lyrically even in moments of great tension. Stirling simply gets better every time I hear him. His control in the soft, slow passages was simply wonderful to hear.

After the performance Stirling happened to be standing next to me in a crush, one of those serendipidous happenstances of this Festival, and I twitted him on his love of programmatic music.

'It was all programmatic in Brahm's time,' he said. 'The slow movement [Adagio mesto] is a description of every detail of his beloved mother's death.'

The finale is a rousing re-affirmation of life. I want it played over my grave by Hamelin, Levin and Stirling.

The 10.30pm performance brought the big voice of Jaunita Lascarro back to the library of Bantry House in Shostakovich's setting of Seven Romances on Verses by Alexander Blok, with Joanna McGregor on the piano, Levin again, and Anne Gastinel on the cello.

Lascarro is truly stunningly powerful, her strength and passion reaching out to us even over McGregor at her most forceful on the piano.

Shostakovich is in this composition a singer-killer, but the indomitable Lascarro triumphed.
 

Bantry, Co Cork, Ireland. 1 July 1998

The problem with Das Lied von der Erde (The song of the Earth) of 1908 is that the horn of plenty which was Gustav Mahler here overflows. He knew he was dying, he had the sorrow of the death of a child, he wanted to get it all down.

In the full version the plenty drowns out the singers.

The Transcription for Chamber Orchestra by Schonberg and Rainer Riehn is "shorn of the multitude of sound effects it owes to its orchestration". This was the version heard under the baton of Lionel Friend on Wednesday in the Church of Ireland, Bantry as part of the West Cork Chamber Music Festival.

The evening opened with an agreeable early work by Beethoven, the Septet in E flat, opus 20, with Duncan McTier on the double bass and a list of the usual Festival suspects giving much delight.

As if unaware of which scoring of Das Lied he was singing to, Ludwig van Gijsegem, far from being drowned out in the first song, "Drinking Song of the World's Sorrows", belted it out as if he were in the Concertgebouw rather than in a small provincial church. By his second turn he had modulated somewhat. He is a very fine singer but here mismatched to the hall.

Alison Browner, by contrast, another very fine singer when heard in even smaller environs like the library of Bantry house, was vocally too small in her middle and lower registers for even this venue, though her clarity and diction carried nicely to the fifth row. In the fourteenth row at the back of the church, who knows?

Enough of minor technical quibbles. The audience adjusted. The reduced orchestration is a success. The message is better revealed: here is all the sorrow of the world.

To balance the emotional upheaval,  the 10.30pm Festival event was a "Cabaret" with Jody Applebaum in the West Lodge Hotel.

Applebaum's has an excellent soprano voice, she is an actress of great dramatic power and witty gesture, and she has the great good fortune to be married to the super-virtuoso pianist Marc-Andre Hamelin, who accompanied her and even sang a couple of words.

We discovered that Hamelin plays a mean ragtime, and that Applebaum, besides being all innuendo and sly wit, is a scholar of twentieth century cabaret music, learning which she wears lightly.

In the moment of its passing, we discovered that cabaret songs are the lieder of our century.
 

Bantry, Co Cork, Ireland. 30 June 1998

The Russian "theme" of the West Cork Chamber Music Festival is an irrelevance. It is all just good music. The Borodin String Quartet is the Russian connection.

As if to make this point, the 8.30pm concert on Tuesday opened with Ravel's Piano Trio in A minor of 1914. That it was written in five frenzied weeks by a composer who knew he might have to "go away" is known but never heard in the music. This is Ravel at his most disarmingly inconsequential. It is rivetting entertainment.

Joanna McGregor on the piano, Ida Levin on the violin, and the cello of Anne Gastinel is one of those fortuitous groupings the festival makes possible. They, and Ravel, are not about dark messages but about a magpie collection of flashing impressions of the utmost charm. Malayan verse forms and ground-bass constructions rub shoulders with great courtesy and mutual admiration.

Shostakovich's String Quartet no 3 in F major of 1946 is another sort of animal altogether. With 20/20 hindsight its intent to expose a brutal regime is clear, and that is how the Borodin plays it, very movingly, giving Shostakovich's intended irony full weight. It is a carnivorous animal, complete with relentlessly drumlike plucking rhythms and a devouringly dirgelike Adagio. The applause of the sophisticated audience called the Borodin back so often that I lost count.

Of the three pieces offered over the two events I attended, the Shostakovich is the only one which coheres consciously.

Indeed, Tchaikovsky, who surely had a claim to understand it if anyone ever could, said of Beethoven's String Quartet in A minor opus 132 of 1826 that it offers "glimmers and nothing more...the rest is chaos." But if the listener brings his naivete to the performance and considers it merely as moving, broken music, rather than as the subject for a formal analysis, it works at a very deep level.

The Borodin rendition of the Beethoven at the sell-out 10.30pm performance gave a rare insight into this mystical music. Some in the audience who had struggled with the A minor on disk were sitting on edges of their seats, slow rapture breaking over their faces. The Borodin was visibly bringing forth comprehension from chaos. It is what great performers do. The Borodin does it better.

For an encore the Borodin played two short Shostakovich pieces, of which the polka finale is wondrously humorous in its references, dynamics and scoring. These fellows can play at any country wedding!
 

Bantry, Co Cork, Ireland. 29 June 1998

In the park beyond the huge glass doors of the library at Bantry House it was a soft Irish day. The backdrop suited the calm majesty of Marc-Andre Hamelin's playing.

Hamelin had started with Haydn's Sonata No 60 in C major (H.XVI.50) and followed that with Schubert's Piano Sonata in B flat, D960.

The Schubert sonata offers plenty of varied pace and emotion. It is not one of the obvious virtuoso pieces. In any event, the Festival, with so much established talent, is beyond any interest in mere virtuosity. Hamelin's intense playing is not about technique, it is about emotion engendered by the performer in the audience.

Once knows a great pianist not from the loud and the fast passages but from the slow ones. Any old virtuoso, and most mechanics, can manage a brave showing in a loud or a fast section.

A true pianist displays his art in the slow and the low passages. Hamelin is magisterial without ever becoming judgemental. In the end his control and his understanding is such that one does not hear the piano but merely Schumann's emotion.

That is true artistry.  I asked Alex Jeffers, who supplied the piano, if he didn't wish he could float the huge gleaming Steinway up the library stairs the same way Hamelin magically disappeared it from between him and his audience, but Alex only laughed. There's a lot of laughter at Bantry House this week.

That was the 5pm event at the West Cork Chamber Music Festival on Monday.

At 8.30pm the Vanbrugh delivered Haydn's String Quartet in D major, opus 76, no 5,  and Hugh Tinney with the Borodin played the Brahms Piano Quintet in F minor, opus 34, to the great emotional enrichment of the audience.

At 10.30pm Juanita Lascarro sang songs by Faure and Poulenc. She is a Colombian, very young.

Her soprano is focussed and utterly true, and she projects it with great confidence. I do not remember seeing the piano that far open for any other singer, never mind one so young. It seemed as well that Stefan Irmer, her accompanist, has a very sure and light touch.

Her diction and clarity, and her French, are impeccable.

Lascarro has the true dramatic touch, and more than once had the audience chuckling only moments after passages of moving passion. She will go a very, very long way.
 

Bantry, Co Cork, Ireland. 28 June 1998

The hushed tones of the world-famous Borodin String Quartet opened the Third West Cork Chamber Music Festival in the library of Bantry House with Tchaikovsky's First SQ, the D major of 1871.

At the first performance of his quartet, the young Tchaikovsky was seated next to Tolstoy when the great man was moved to tears by the second, andante cantabile, movement of the new composition. Ah, yes!

"Never in my life," Tchaikovsky said afterwards, "have I been so flattered, nor felt so proud of my work."

The Borodin, which now has some younger members, perhaps as a reminder of their own mortality to music lovers of a mere three score years who grew up with their recordings, play with enormous confidence and presence. But the hushed respect of the audience before they started playing soon gave way to an almost audible sigh--visible as limbs and chests relaxing--when their great reputation was vindicated from the opening notes.

I thought their tone a little astringent, not very Russian, but then they are serious musicians, who have probably never in their life played down to an opening night crowd merely for popularity.

Alison Browner, an Irish soprano who lives in Germany and is making a rare appearance "at home", is quite simply stunning. She gave a rendition of Mussorgsky's The Nursery which had the audience on the edge of their seats with tension and laughter.

Mussorgsky's Nursery is not for children, though it is about their darkest fears and deepest pleasures, like a cat at a canary in a cage.

Browner has that clarity and diction that I so often want to tell singing teachers to inculcate in their pupils. Absolutely no slop here. And exemplar. No wonder she goes over so big with the precise Germans.

Her accompanist, David Adams, is himself a wonder to hear or, more precisely, to subsume osmotically. He quite literally fades into the background to become wallpaper. Mussorgsky is not Schumann, who demands that the pianist be an equal partner, and Adams is quite up to the task of sublimating his own superior talent, which takes a superb craftsman. I'm looking forward to hearing him on the harmonium and the celeste in the Mahler on Wednesday.

Our favourite RTE Vanbrugh String Quartet, the artistic hosts of the festival,  gave a beautifully warm and sentimental rather their usual judicial performance of Beethoven's SQ no 8 in E minor, opus 59 no 2, the second Rasumovsky. They are actually better than they were a year ago, which, considering their high expertise and great reputation, is quite a wonder in itself. In particular, I though this performance matched that on their complete recorded Beethoven cycle on CD.

Altogether a splendid opening to what promises to be another exceptional festival.