Day three of the West Cork Chamber Music Festival was like the day's weather, a bit grey and mixed, but with bright spots.
Violinist Catherine Leonard's midday recital was the strangest I have heard her give. Her tone was gritty and coarse, her delivery unusually full of effort. This may well have been a reaction to the poorly-aligned and over-assertive playing of the pianist, Michael Joyce. But, whatever the cause, the excess of projection in the small confines of Bantry House's Gobelin drawing room, masked the normally easy-flowing character of her musicianship.
The late afternoon concert brought an uneasy festival debut from forte-pianist Patrick Cohen. He was playing late trios by Haydn and Mozart with two members of the Quatuor Mosaiques, Erich Hobarth (violin) and Christophe Coin (cello). The special insights you might expect from period-performance specialists were thin on the ground, and Mozart's Trio in G, not one of the composer's stronger creations, sounded particularly feeble. The Cohen/Mosaiqes combination were heard to rather better effect in a Boccherini Piano Quintet in D, in the main evening concert. The real highlight here, however, came from the Arditti Quartet, in the compact, expressively distilled worlds of Gyorgy Kurtag's Officium breve, written in memory of fellow composer Endre Szervansky. It's in works like this, where the minutest of gestures can generate the most intense of results in forms of sometimes extreme brevity, that Kurtag seems the only natural successor to Webern.
The RTE Vanbrugh String Quartet were joined by Italian viola-player Danilo Rossi for a performance of Dvorak's Op. 95 String Quintet that was more assertive than songful. And Joanna MacGregor gave a late-night performance of John Cage's ever-wonderful Sonatas and Interludes for that one-person percussion band, the prepared piano. Her approach was unusually delicate, almost ruminative, the best effects, she would have one believe, to be had by gentle stroking rather than percussive attack. The midweek evening concert is always an event with a difference at the West Cork Chamber Music Festival. The use of Bantry's Church of Ireland allows the boundaries of chamber music to be stretched a bit, last year to include Schoenberg's reduction of Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde, this year for Mozart's Serenade for 13 Wind Instruments. And, keeping to the festival's tradition of luxury programme planning, the second half was given over to works for cello octet, by Jane O'Leary, Villa-Lobos and John Tavener.
The concert opened on a sad note, a performance of Tavener's Song of the Angel by Patricia Rozario and the RTE Vanbrugh String Quartet in memory of Matt Kingston, festival board member and staunch supporter from the idea stage onwards, who died on Tuesday. Performers and piece blended in moving simplicity.
Mozart's great serenade is without equal, the most endlessly pleasurable of large works for wind ensemble. The sound of the 13 instruments - the Octuor Paris-Bastille plus players from the NSO (one of them actually, of course, a double bass) - is so large and the Bantry Church so small, that the concert offered an experience more like a sonic immersion than normal listening. There are few pieces which either invite or so consistently reward such immersion. And the performance fully justified it, too.
Any composer writing a work for eight cellos can reasonably expect it to stand in the shadow of the fifth in VillaLobos's series of Bachianas brasileiras, not least because the Villa-Lobos is likely to afford its most frequent pretext for concert performance.
Jane O'Leary's Distant Voices plays with textured layers and a fragmented traditional Irish tune in ways that suggest her aim was a greater body and mass than she's actually achieved with the eight instruments at her disposal. There's little tonal richness in the result, more a sense of thinned-out instrumental timbre.
The Villa-Lobos itself, cunningly intertwining the preoccupations of the title in one of the most memorable texturable weavings this century has produced, was sung with appealing directness by Patricia Rozario.
The work which closed the concert, Tavener's Wake Up and Die for solo cello (Alban Gerhardt) plus cello octet, greatly over extends its basic material. Gerhardt played with impressive refinement and concentration, but, even so, the ideas did not sustain the piece.
The West Cork Chamber Music Festival continues until Sunday. To book phone 027- 61576
