Gerald Barry's Six Marches For String Quartet, commissioned by the festival and premiered on Sunday, are hardly what you would call march-like. These varied pieces sound as if they might have been conceived for anything apart from two-legged beings.
Whether harsh or gritty, playful or skittish, the marches seem to inhabit a world of almost ascetic rigour. Vibrato is almost totally banished, the one occasion of significant indulgence sounding like a reference to an outside world. And referentiality seems an anchor. It's as if Barry had, like Jorge Luis Borges, fabricated in this piece the kind of music an unbroken history of the viol consort might have led to in our own time, and then chosen to synthesise it on the string quartet. The Vanbrugh's playing was aptly stark, strong and straight.
The other highlight of the day was a piano recital by Enrico Pace, who created quite a stir and took second prize at the 1991 GPA Dublin International Piano Competition. In the 10 years since then, the Italian has lost nothing of his winning ways with Schumann and Liszt.
Liszt is the association that has stuck in the public mind, and Bantry's offerings included a tautly sprung Second Hungarian Rhapsody and a stirring Second Ballade. But even more remarkable was Pace's identification with the full range of the emotional masks in the 18 pieces that make up Schumann's Davidsbundlertanze.
Pace showed something of the poetic responsiveness of an Alfred Cortot and the visionary focus of a Sviatoslav Richter in a performance that brought quicksilver responses to bear on music where a single harmonic turn can, in the right hands, open up unexpected vistas, and the churning chordal energy make the heart seem ready to burst. Unforgettable.
Earlier in the day, Anthony Marwood offered a rare opportunity to hear the work of one of Italy's leading composers, Salvatore Sciarrino, whose six Caprices of 1976 showed a familiar propensity to examine individual instruments and ensembles and recast their potential in terms of the sounds of the flute. In the Caprices, this concern is carried out with a consciously Paganinian emphasis on virtuosity.
Also heard during the day was a sadly rough-hewn account of Beethoven's Archduke Trio from the Florestan Trio, a fresh and energetic performance by members of the Ensemble Paris-Bastille of Endre Szervanszky's lightweight Wind Quintet of 1953, and a committed reading by the Dominant Quartet of Alfred Schnittke's kitschy Third Quartet of 1983.
