Francis Humphrys, director of the West Cork Chamber Music Festival, put together the sort of programme he would like to go to himself. Michael Dervan enjoys the last few days in Bantry
The glut of music-making that is the West Cork Chamber Music Festival hasn't changed in essential character since its foundation in 1996. The festival is, to all intents and purposes, the equivalent of the house built by an architect for his or her own family, or the unique, non-production line car created by a designer for personal use. Festival director Francis Humphrys has managed that simple-seeming but most elusive of achievements - putting together the sort of festival he would like to go to himself. This means that the repertoire moves in unexpected directions, adventurously, even capriciously. He has colonised areas of contemporary and early music as well as exploring a legion of backwaters and neglected figures, much as the Wexford Festival does in the area of opera.
Underpinning his vision is the atmosphere of Bantry House. It's a setting that's beautiful in weather fair and foul, and although it is acoustically difficult for the musicians (and for those members of the audience who are less favourably seated), there's a feeling of contact between players and listeners that is enhanced as they mingle and chat before and after the performances.
The mix of musical events - more than 50 in all - includes a plethora of opportunities for young musicians, who are generously served by the series of masterclasses that have been integrated into the heart of the festival.
Central to Humphrys's concept is the fact that the he doesn't just buy in, as it were, existing work. Musicians from around the world, some of whom have never met or even seen each other, rehearse and perform together in Bantry, sometimes on works they've never played before. Over 25 of the pieces at this year's festival are in the category of collaborations unique to Bantry, some probably never to be repeated, others perhaps, as in earlier years, leading to musical relationships that will develop and thrive well into the future.
Central to the ethos is the shaping of the individual concert programmes, in which the luxury of having so many musicians captive for the duration is fully exploited. The opening and closing programmes made the strategy clear, with the three string quartets of the opening concert each played by a different ensemble, and the works at the other end - a piano and wind quintet, a piano trio, and a string quintet - performed without any overlap of performers.
It has been Humphrys's good fortune to have found an audience willing to accompany him on his musical journeys. His work is that of an amateur in the best sense of the word, and there are listeners eager to share his enthusiasms and take the plunge into territory so risky that many of his programmes would never be ventured in front of a paying audience in the capital. As well as the main festival programme and the masterclasses, there were also a series of concerts by young musicians in the town centre, a literary fringe, and exhibitions.
But for most people attending the festival, the music's the thing, this year more so than ever, as the wet weather drove greater numbers indoors, and helped the festival achieve a record in box office income.
IT PROBABLY wouldn't have taken inclement weather to produce a large turnout for soprano Charlotte Riedijk's performance of Shostakovich's late song cycle, Seven Romances on Poems of Alexander Blok. Riedijk is already engraved in the festival's collective memory for last year's riveting performance of Messiaen's Harawi, and her familiar intensity of focus brought both clarity and passion to Shostakovich's death-obsessed writing. The cycle treats each song to a different scoring, and the members of the Altenberg Trio ably partnered Riedijk in traversing the chilling gamut of the writing, from whispered violin flurries to the implacable walls of tone that Claus-Christian Schuster extruded from the lower end of the piano.
Pavel Nersessian is another pianist who, like Schuster, shuns the generalised effect in favour of the particular, and seems to take a distinct pleasure in revealing the inner musical mechanisms that produce the outward effect. He, too, was heard in late Shostakovich, the Viola Sonata completed a month before the composer's death in 1975. This is bleak, cryptic music - the markings in the score offer not the slightest clue as to the music's mood - and the performance by Andrei Gridchuk and Nersessian seemed somehow to lay it bare and yet retain its essential mystery.
Nersessian was also heard in violin sonatas with Ani Kavafian, including Prokofiev's normally sunny Sonata in D (an unsettled and unsettling tussle between musicians who seemed unable to agree on how the piece should go) and Franck's Sonata in A (at the other end of the scale, a mesmerising tour de force from both players). Nersessian also performed Rimsky-Korsakov's Quintet for Piano and Wind, a rather watery-sounding piece, with members of the Paris-Bastille Ensemble. Frank Bridge's vacuously inflated Piano Quintet was performed with bombast by Finghin Collins and the Shanghai String Quartet.
Also from the East came a festival commission from Chinese composer Zhou Long, Harmony. The influence of Bartók (a declared role model) was as evident as the whistling and sliding evocations of Chinese music in a piece which, although brand new, somehow had the patina of age. The performance by the RTÉ Vanbrugh Quartet was the highlight of their contribution to this year's festival.
Another highlight of the closing days was the Callino Quartet's unhackneyed directness in Haydn's challenging Quartet in C, Op 54 No 2. The quartet's leader, Ioana Petcu-Colan, was unfazed by her part's vertiginously high excursions, and the group's unforced musicianship allowed Haydn a freedom of expression that more self-consciously probing approaches often fail to achieve. This young Irish ensemble's performance of Brian Boydell's Adagio and Scherzo, the completed movements of a projected Fourth Quartet, had a persuasive air of all passion spent.
The Artis Quartet tackled the often impossible-seeming opening movement of Brahms's Quartet in B flat, Op 67 at a speed and with a lightness and sharpness that transformed a potentially clumping work into a display of refined agility.
The Altenberg Trio's offerings included the 1985 Trio in Three Movements by Mauricio Kagel, music exploiting familiar mannerisms with a sense of rich artifice and also a beguiling undertow of secrecy, in spite of the fact that, on the surface, it is about as direct as the accompaniment to a silent film. The Altenberg's performance captured its whimsy and depth to perfection.
