Cork has been the permanent base of a professional string quartet, courtesy of RTÉ, for half a century now. And, courtesy of West Cork Music, the celebration of the southern capital's term as European Capital of Culture brought the city what has to have been the single biggest quartet festival this country has ever witnessed, European Quartet Week, writes Michael Dervan

The string quartet as we know it is usually traced back to Haydn, a composer whose crucial importance to the early development of the genre is beyond question. The exact moment of conception, however is not known.

The RTÉ Vanbrugh Quartet's second violinist, Keith Pascoe, has proposed a quartet written by Boccherini in 1761 as a possible precursor to Haydn's first. Jochen Reutter's New Grove article on Franz Xaver Richter suggests the quartets of his Op. 5 may have been written as early as 1757. Never mind. For near on 250 years now, the combination of two violins, viola and cello has stimulated composers to write some of their most intimate, personal and, on occasion, radical works. The important question for the festival was how to reduce the available repertoire choices into individual programmes for the seven ensembles playing in Cork.

The most adventurous programming strand was a midday series of concerts highlighting double-cello quintets by Boccherini and featuring the expertise of Richard Lester as extra cellist. These programmes were originally scheduled for a corner of UCC's new Lewis Glucksman Gallery. But UCC's generosity in supporting the quartet festival was tarnished by banishing three of these concerts to the boomy acoustic of the Honan Chapel (where the sound of external building work could also be heard), as well as by the extraordinary difficulties of entry and exit presented by locked gates for the first concert in the Aula Maxima.

The best-known movements from the Boccherini quintets have an appeal so far ahead of the other movements that one can readily see why the verdict of posterity has been to excerpt the favourite bits, which include the composer's famous Minuet. Yet it's also true that these quintets are generally underestimated. The composer was one of the greatest cellists of his day, and his style of coloratura cello writing, at once virtuosic and lyrical, is one that the 19th century came to forget about, and which, as a result, manages to sound uniquely fresh, even today.

The Vanbrugh Quartet provided the Boccherini highlight, a performance of one of the composer's finest works, the Quintet in F minor, G348. The Vanbrughs gave the impression of having an easier relationship with Boccherini that with, say, Haydn or Mozart. They seem able to find an even keel, a balance between attempted expressive input and actual expressive output, more readily in Boccherini than in the music of his greater colleagues.

At the other end of the scale in Boccherini came the stressful and stress-inducing playing of the Lindsays. This much-praised ensemble presented the literature of the string quartet as a kind of romanticised public utterance, yet they could be supremely effective when they turned in on themselves for the private passions of the most demanding among the slow movements of Haydn.

Too often for my taste their playing gave the impression of following a well-rutted path, not always with technical finesse. As well as their remarkable Haydn (they played the Quartets in C, Op 54 No 2, and in D, Op 76 No 5), they gave an almost orchestrally conceived performance of Dvorák's Quintet in E flat, Op 97, with the Vanbrugh's viola player, Simon Aspell.

The members of the Tokyo Quartet were altogether more measured in manner. The main touch of edgy pressure, of prima donna-like extravagance, came from the leader, Martin Beaver. It was hardly surprising, then, that they sounded at their best in the sixth of Beethoven's Op 18 quartets, a set which creates especial challenges for the first violin.

The Quatuor Debussy, whose late Beethoven in the opening concert had been largely disappointing, blossomed almost beyond recognition in the music of their fellow countrymen, Fauré and Debussy. Here the precision of their harmonic colouring allowed the music to resonate with exceptional, almost extra-dimensional richness. They conveyed the strange stillness at the heart of Fauré's late quartet with great success, and also offered a high-powered performance of Franck's often darkly-fevered Piano Quintet with Marie-Josèphe Jude.

The Callino Quartet's Boccherini (the Quintet in D, G353) was presented with captivating lightness and agility, the style heavily influenced by the manners and sonorities of period performances. Freshness is the key word for the Callino's playing, but along with its appeal in Schumann (the Quartet in A, Op 41 No 3) and Beethoven (the Quartet in F, Op 135) went a feeling that sometimes things were not as fully finished or as thoroughly worked out as they needed to be.

Galway's ensemble in residence, the ConTempo Quartet, conveyed the flightiness of the opening movement of Mendelssohn's Quartet in D, Op 44 No 1 with the strong sense of a quartet on form and in its prime. By contrast, their Bartók (No 4) was heavy rather than powerful, so deliberate at times that sounded almost pedantic. It was as if the intensity of concentration on the individual lines was impeding the collective vision of the whole.

They offered rich rewards in Mozart's String Quintet in G minor, K516, with the Quatuor Debussy's viola player, Vincent Deprecq, but their Boccherini (the Quintet in C, G310) and Beethoven (the Quartet in C, Op 59 No 3) were compromised by speeds that were too fast for the Honan Chapel's acoustic.

The impression of the ConTempos as a group set on pushing the interpretative envelope in their work was perhaps most keenly felt in their highly idiosyncratic performance of Shostakovich's Eighth Quartet, given in the banking hall of AIB on South Mall, where the music was subjected to a stream of after-hours, walk-through intrusions from the apparently heedless bank staff. It was a performance full of imaginative daring, yet the very next piece, Brahms's Quartet in B flat, Op 67, resolutely refused to yield to these Romanians' spirited assault.

Sitting through the festival at various times, I engaged in a private game. If there were some latter-day patron wanting to hire a string quartet, which one would I recommend? I could point to the Vanbrughs for their Boccherini, the Lindsays for their treasurable moments in Haydn, the Tokyos for their well-mannered savoir-faire, the Debussys for their insightful treatment of French repertoire, the Callinos for dispensing with a wealth of well-worn mannerisms, the ConTempos for their free-spirited adventurousness.

But the quartet I would nominate is one that I haven't mentioned yet, the Quarteto Casals from Spain, which I managed to hear in just a single, midday concert. I found myself mesmerised by the melting beauty they brought to Turina's impressionistic Oración del Torero, dazzled by the jewelled glints and deeply touched by the piercing pathos they found in the Quartet in A by the early 19th-century Spanish child prodigy, Arriaga, and struck by the resinous tone and sinewy character they brought to Boccherini (the Quintet in F, G290), evoking the world of the viol consort. Their playing had a combination of imaginative newness and technical polish that simply made me want to hear them again and again and again.