Wednesday was an all-baroque day in the two major musical strands at Kilkenny Arts Week. JeanGuihen Queyras played Bach's Second and Sixth suites for solo cello in the Parade Tower of Kilkenny Castle at lunchtime, and the resident period-instruments ensemble offered Muffat, CPE Bach, Vivaldi, Handel and Telemann at Duiske Abbey, Graiguenamanagh at 6 p.m.
Queyras had the better of the bargain when it came to repertoire, as the chamber music programme offered nothing that could aspire to the elevated level of Bach's cello music. The Oboe Sonata in G minor by one of Bach's sons, Carl Philipp Emanuel, has few of the adventurous touches that make much of the younger composer's output so quirkily stimulating. Marcel Ponseele can hardly be held fully responsible for the piece being so simply uneventful. Vivaldi's earnest Cello Sonata in B flat needs a performance of greater individuality and character than Gesine Queyras produced.
With one or two exceptions, Handel's harpsichord music has about it a dry correctness that sounds like the triumph of craft over invention, and even the persuasive powers of Malcolm Proud failed to find any extra spark in the Suite in F minor.
That extra element materialised in Maya Homburger's mercurial performance of the Sonata in D by Georg Muffat, and also in the closing item, Telemann's Trio Sonata in G from Essercizii Musici, which allowed the full ensemble to shine.
Queyras is not a period-instrument player, but the developments of the period instruments world informed his music-making. Vibrato was sparing. Articulation was airy rather than sticky. The dance origins of the various movements were carefully judged. And the whole was carried off without the intrusion of the almost ideological need many cellists feel to make their instrument sing with passion.
