The festival's two main musical strands, one of baroque, the other mainly of 19th and 20th-century chamber music, began on Tuesday.
The former introduced all four players - Maya Homburger (violin), Gesine Queyras (cello), Marcel Ponseele (oboe) and Malcolm Proud (harpsichord) - in sonatas for their instruments. Homburger's handling of Bach's Sonata In G, BWV1021, for violin and continuo, suggested she was tempted by a degree of fantasy that Queyras was shying away from in the continuo. Queyras's responses to Vivaldi's Cello Sonata No 5 confirmed the steady hand of her approach. Ponseele's open-hearted playing in the G-minor sonata from Telemann's Tafelmusik lifted the music-making to a higher level. But compositional invention reached a peak, and found playing with spark to match, in Proud's delivery of Scarlatti's Sonata In G, K146.
The concert at St Canice's Cathedral, opening the chamber-music series, suffered a change of programme. The original pianist, Alexandre Tharaud, was indisposed, and his place was taken by Jerome Ducros, who played Brahms's Piano Quartet In C Minor. It was given a thoroughly modern performance, free of the cheap emoting so often offered in the name of romanticism.
Christine Busch (violin) and Anna Lewis (viola) were rather more astringent than the more warm-hearted Queyras and Ducros, a gentlemanly, recessively supportive partner. The concert opened with Beethoven's early Clarinet Trio, Ronald van Spaendonck joining Queyras and Ducros to offer unalloyed pleasure in a reading that was perky, genial and high-spirited.
Ducros was too self-effacing in Schumann's Op 73 Fantasy Pieces for clarinet and piano, but Van Spaendonck's handling of Stravinsky's Three Pieces For Solo Clarinet had verve and wit. Lewis was a persuasive advocate of Zimmermann's Solo Viola Sonata, a work conceived almost as an organic outgrowth of the chorale Gelobet Seist Du Jesu Christ, and which intriguingly blends avant-garde techniques with its source material.
