Bantry House
The final Sunday of the West Cork Chamber Music Festival is the day which most prominently features performances by young musicians. Master classes are an important feature of the festival's activity. Anyone with a taste for behind-the-scenes preparation can witness the passing on of wisdom, morning and afternoon, before and between the concerts.
This year saw the return of the Callino Quartet, which grew out of the Bantry master classes two years ago, and is now, by a long shot, the most polished young string quartet that Ireland has recently produced. It was interesting, in their programme of Tchaikovsky, Prokofiev and Vasks, to see how their range of skills has been developing.
You could sense teachers' hands in some of the gestures that didn't quite gel. The tone at the beginning of Tchaikovsky's early quartet movement, for instance, was exquisite, but the sense of continuity was lost in the making of it. And Prokofiev's First Quartet challenged their ability to deal with multi-functional phrasing: ends which must work as beginnings, too, and cross-fadings in crucial moments of transition.
But the good news is that they still seem to have the makings of a fine quartet, if the chemistry of that most demanding of musical relationships still continues to function internally for them.
Three ensembles made a first-time appearance in the actual young musicians' concert: a wind quintet and two string quartets. The young wind players relished the challenges of Ligeti's Bagatelles, but didn't always bring that touch of necessary magic to Danzi's Quintet in G minor, Op. 56 No 2, though Cormac Henry's flute playing frequently lifted the performance of this piece onto a higher level.
The more successful of the two quartets (Cora Venus Lunny and Gregory Harrington, violins; Niamh Quigley, viola; and Hanno Strydom, cello) gave a very creditable account of themselves and the music in the daunting terrain of Shostakovich's Ninth Quartet.
Shostakovich was a close friend of Mieczyslaw Vainberg (1919-96), a composer whose output the festival has been championing of late. The Seventh String Quartet of 1957, which was played in the closing concert by the Dominant Quartet, is a Shostakovich-haunted work, both emotionally and in terms of musical style. The Dominants, who have already recorded it for Olympia, gave of their finest, showing their lean, understated manner at its most potent.
Potency of word and gesture are features of Gyorgy Kurtag's 1982 Scenes from a Novel, 15 short poems by Rimma Dalos of woman's lost love in settings for soprano (Rosemary Hardy), violin (Jeanne-Marie Conquer), double bass (Annika Pigorsch) and cimbalom (Ildiko Vekony). The shard-like texts ("That's another/ Sunday over./ That means the next will come" or "In a cold blanket of snow/ a visitor called:/ sorrow") remain remarkably undisturbed by Kurtag's aphoristic musical inter-penetrations. Once heard, even when apparently un-matching, these settings make music and word seem inseparable.
And to round the festival off, a rabble-rouser of a piece, Dohnanyi's sub-Brahmsian Piano Quintet, Op. 1, in a sweep-them-off-their-feet performance by Enrico Pace with the RT╔ Vanbrugh Quartet. This was a festival finale which seemed to leave everyone in the highest of spirits.
