The Vogler Spring Festival, held last weekend at St Columba's Church, Drumcliffe, Co Sligo, is a much more leisurely affair than its big brother at the other end of the country, the West Cork Chamber Music Festival.
The Sligo Festival runs for four instead of nine days. It never runs more than three concerts in a single day. And, like West Cork, it has abandoned programmes of extravagant length in favour of ones that are more reasonably planned. In a church where the discomfort of the pews is always going to be a factor, this is an important consideration. But at any musical event it is always better to leave the audience wishing for more rather than the opposite.
Two performers in particular this year stood out when it came to whetting the audience's appetite: Israeli clarinettist Sharon Kam and Uzbekistani pianist Eugene Mursky.
On the one hand, Kam's playing brought to mind what Virgil Thomson described as the technical basis of one of Debussy's favourite singers, Maggie Teyte, that of "being able to sing any vowel in any colour and at any degree of loudness or softness on any note of one's choice". And on the other, she showed a long-arched vision and implacable firmness of rhythm that reminded one of the pianism of Sviatoslav Richter.
Kam's art is based on high adaptability, yet it is one in which that adaptability is not shown off for its own sake. She was heard in works by Stravinsky, Brahms, Schumann and Bruch, and in each case gave the impression of subsuming her own character in that of the music.
Incredible as it may seem, however, it was in a selection of three of Bruch's Op 83 Pieces for clarinet, viola and piano that she was heard to best advantage.
This is minor-league music, written in impeccably crafted mid-19th-century style, although it was actually composed in 1909. Kam and her partners, viola player Guy Ben-Ziony and Mursky at the piano, handled it with such melting beauty, refined delicacy and quicksilver wit that its latent charm was not just fully exposed but enhanced, and won listeners over with the effect of an unfamiliar but perfectly balanced floral perfume.
Kam explored the extreme sonorities of Stravinsky's Three Pieces for solo clarinet with sharply etched aplomb. And she gave fine readings of the Brahms Clarinet Quintet (with the Vogler Quartet) and the Clarinet Sonata in E flat (with pianist Martin Helmchen), which, to my ears, were let down by her musical partners. The first violin line in the quintet followed too soloistic a path, and Helmchen sounded too monochrome to provide the necessary musical balance with the resourceful Kam.
The magic ingredient in the Bruch was in no small part due to the contribution of Eugene Mursky, who also played the pianistic tour-de-force that is Stravinsky's Three Movements from Petrushka without undue showmanship, concentrating instead on the chordal balances in which so much of Stravinsky's distinctive colouring lies.
Mursky and Helmchen joined forces for some chalk-and-cheese piano duet partnerships, a handful of Brahms waltzes, and Schubert's Fantasy in F minor, the masterpiece of this composer's generous legacy of four-handed keyboard music.
Mursky joined the Voglers for a lump-in-the-throat performance of Alfred Schnittke's memorial to his mother, the Piano Quintet which he finished after a four-year struggle in 1976, and he also partnered tenor Robin Tritschler in a set of songs by Tchaikovsky, the Six Romances, Op 73.
This performance was remarkable for its suggestions of baritonal resonance in a voice that has lost nothing of its lightness. Forget the Irish Tenors, the Celtic Tenors and their ilk. Tritschler is the Irish tenor to hear at the moment, an intelligent and sensitive musician who has taken command of his once wayward voice and developed it into an instrument of altogether unexpected complexity and range.
Cellist Guy Johnston joined the Voglers and Ben-Ziony for a reading of Brahms's String Sextet in G which dispensed with the practice of making this work sound as overweight as the composer himself later became in person, and he also gave an affectingly sinewy account of Bach's Solo Cello Suite in C.
I was disappointed by the closing concert's gung-ho performance of Schubert's Trout Quintet (the Voglers and Helmchen with double bassist Ronan Dunne), but the audience felt otherwise, and roared approval at the end.
On their own, the Voglers were at their best in the Fourth String Quartet by Jörg Widmann, commissioned by Dean R Gaudin for the quartet's 20th anniversary, and here receiving its Irish premiere.
On a first hearing it gave the impression of being an ultra-modern orchestration (if you can use that word about a string quartet) of something as familiar as an archetypal hymn tune, that's been rendered scarcely recognisable through the elaborate coloration and filigree of its presentation.
The other new work of the festival was a much simpler affair, Kontraste (Contrasts), a showily episodic solo for alto saxophone played with panache by its composer, German saxophonist Hugo Read.
Vogler Spring Festival, St Columba's Church, Drumcliffe, Sligo,
