Petite Symphonie - Gounod

String Quartet No 3Sofia - Gubaidulina

String Quartet in C minor Op 51 No 1 - Brahms

The West Cork Chamber Music Festival opened in great style on Saturday with a performance of Gounod's Petite Symphonie, a work with hardly a trace of the sentimentality or religiosity often found elsewhere in this composer's output.

Scored for flute with pairs of oboes, clarinets, horns and bassoons, the Petite Symphonie is a delectable creation of the utmost charm. And that's exactly how Philippe Bernold and the members of the Ensemble Paris-Bastille played it, with amiable grace and an abundance of good-humoured give and take.

Sofia Gubaidulina, one of the significant composers to emerge from the Soviet Union in the decade preceding its collapse, celebrates her 70th birthday this year. Her String Quartet No3 of 1987 is a study in contrasts, its first half an exploration of what a quartet can do with just its fingers, the second allowing the players at last to put bow to string. This Θtude-like exploratory piece was played with a firm grasp by a young Russian ensemble, the Dominant Quartet.

The festival's resident string quartet, the RT╔ Vanbrugh Quartet, offered the first of Brahms's three quartets as their opening contribution to this year's programme. Brahms's quartets have never achieved the popularity of his symphonies, and the Vanbrugh's performance offered some indications why: the writing is dense and can easily be overloaded when players follow the expressive instincts that serve them so well elsewhere. The high point of the Vanbrugh's performance was the slow movement, in which Gregory Ellis, the leader, relaxed into some of the most beautiful pianissimo playing I've ever heard from him.