Wednesday is always a day with a difference at the festival, when the concert focus shifts away from Bantry House for music-making on a larger scale. StBrendan's Church was the location for two concerts this year, offering Schoenberg's early Chamber Symphony, Opus 9, Beethoven's Seventh Symphony in an arrangement for wind ensemble, a staged performance of Stravinsky's Soldier's Tale and, in a late-night presentation, the music-theatre spectacle of Georges Aperghis's Conversations.
Schoenberg's compact, heavyweight Chamber Symphony meets the one-player- to-a-part definition of chamber music, but with 15 players involved and a conductor required, it's very much a borderline case. You could argue that it's scored and has its material worked out in a way that's inevitably going to make it sound orchestral. And orchestral - sometimes overpoweringly so - is how Wednesday's performance sounded, with Lionel Friend conducting an ensemble based around the Callino String Quartet and the Ensemble Paris-Bastille. But the composer's desire "to express riotous rejoicing" was fulfilled.
The Beethoven arrangement is one of those excuses for wind players (Ensemble Paris-Bastille reinforced by Annika Pigorsch on double bass) to take control of a work in which they normally have to bow to the wishes of a conductor. The pleasure was evident in the playing of every bar.
Stravinsky's Soldier's Tale, a piece to be "read, played and danced", with its mixed ensemble redolent of circus and street band ranging through marches, waltzes, tango and ragtime, is not an easy piece to bring off well.
Gerry O'Brien was the wide-eyed soldier, Brendan Murray a slithery, leering devil, and Peta Coy a mute princess, like a supple, sleepwalking puppet. Mark O'Brien's unobtrusive direction left the resolution of the tale intriguingly in the air.
Anyone looking for resolutions in Aperghis's Conversations would have been seriously frustrated. Aperghis dissects words from their meanings and uses them for their syllabic value in a way that allows new meanings to filter into the vacuum. You could regard the Conversations as a sort of nonsense verse turned into theatre. But that would be to ignore the nature of the blurring of music and theatre that Aperghis has undertaken. He uses irregularly repeating patterns like a sort of Rossini crescendo, combining the tension-building skills of Rossini with a Beckett-like ability to delve beneath the everyday. Gro Lovdal, Hans-Kristian Sorensen and Cecilie Lindeman Steen met all the demands in a way that was sharp, funny and touching.
