Chacony in G minor . . . Purcell

Oboe d'amore Concerto in A minor . . . Telemann

Harpsichord Concerto in D minor Wq23 . . . CPE Bach

Sonata No 5 in G . . . Georg Muffat

Concerto for oboe and violin . . . JS Bach

Baroque music-making at this year's Kilkenny Arts Festival reached its peak on Saturday in the concert by the Kilkenny Festival Baroque Orchestra.

And the peak within the peak was Malcolm Proud's performance of CPE Bach's Harpsichord Concerto in D minor.

It has been the misfortune of CPE Bach, son of the great Johann Sebastian, to be treated by the history books as a transitional figure, a bridge between the music of the baroque and classical eras. He's really his own man, of course, with a fine ear for fantastical effects achieved in some works by consistently stretching and apparently denying the rules of musical logic.

The harpsichord concerto showed his extraordinary gift for driving music forward through cliff-hanging cut-offs and changes in direction.

As in the plot of a complicated thriller, what's just fallen into place is quickly re-defined by later developments, the whole becoming a finely-balanced exercise in borderline plausibility.

Proud and the Kilkenny players, directed by violinist Maya Homburger, showed just the right sort of alertness and rapport for a concerto full of sharp angles, deep shadows, and rapid interchanges between orchestra and soloist. A more bracing antidote to the wintry weather outside would be hard to imagine.

Purcell and Muffat provided other works with quirky turns, both musical and emotional, and more conventional warmth of expression was explored in the concertos by Telemann and JS Bach.

Saturday's lunchtime recital offered two sonatas by Poulenc, Ronald van Spaendonck the flighty communicator of the Clarinet Sonata (Poulenc in jester mode) and Christine Busch both agile and sage in the earlier Violin Sonata, a work that doesn't always sound entirely sure of itself.

The pianist in both was Jerome Ducros, able in the Clarinet Sonata but not quite marrying his volume to the intimate tone of Busch in the Violin Sonata.

The final lunchtime work was FaurΘ's First Piano Quartet, with Priya Mitchell (violin), Anna Lewis (viola) and Jean-Guihen Queyras (cello) joining Ducros, at the piano.

This unique, haunting and witty work has to be the most distinctive of 19th-century piano quartets. At least, that's how these four players made it sound.

They disappeared, as it were, into the very fabric of the music itself to give expression to just one musical character, FaurΘ's.