In contrast to the Russian theme of the opening concert on Sunday, yesterday's three programmes at the West Cork Chamber Music Festival in Bantry were fully international.
Canadian pianist MarcAndre Hamelin, one of the greatest living exponents of supra-Lisztian virtuosity, gave an afternoon recital which restricted itself to music from periods earlier than he is normally associated with.
Haydn's late Sonata in C, Hob XVI:50, was the less comfortable of his offerings. The opening Allegro was taken, cleanly and effortlessly, at a lick which denied the Allegro molto finale the necessary sense of gearing up of tempo, the central Adagio presented with peaks of momentary drama rather than probed for its vein of innate pathos.
In the main evening concert, the RTE Vanbrugh Quartet offered a vibrant, solidly-projected account of Haydn, the Quartet in D, Op. 76 No. 5, the joie-de-vivre of the playing somewhat counteracted by a lack of air in the phrasing and an over-eagerness to keep too much of the material consistently in the foreground.
Their handling of the short Aus der Ferne III by the man who is surely the heir to Webern among living composers, Hungary's Gyorgy Kurtg, was exemplary, the music's arching climax over a drum-like, repeated low cello note, suggesting far more than most composers would manage from such simple material.
The climax of the day came from Hugh Tinney and the Borodin Quartet in the Piano Quintet of Brahms. The Borodins play this music like no other group, the lines taut, sparking with electrical charge, the gauging of every nuance, the pacing of every climax breath-exact. The sense they create of one musical mind with four infinitely malleable extensions is awe-inspiring. Tinney locked into their musical vision as if he'd discovered he was of the same lineage, and the sharing of minds was so thrilling one felt only Brahms could have imagined it so.
Colombian soprano Juanita Lascarro's late-night performance of songs by Faure and Poulenc, given with German pianist Stefan Irmer, provided simpler pleasures, the purity of her voice, the unadorned delivery welcomely less heady.
