There was a time when you could safely assume that most of the country's significant musical activity was to be found in the capital. But, just as the Borodin String Quartet's Shostakovich cycle in Bantry was drawing to a close, the first ever ESB Vogler Spring Festival was getting underway at Drumcliffe Church in Co Sligo. Sligo is now in the enviable position of having three annual music festivals - the others focusing on early and contemporary music - as well as, of course, the ground-breaking residency of the Vogler Quartet itself.
The Shostakovich cycle and Vogler Festivals actually overlapped, so, in completing the Shostakovich experience, I had to miss the opening two concerts in Sligo. First impressions of the historic St Columba's Church (the poet Yeats is buried here) were of appealing acoustic liveliness and transparency, plus exceptional physical discomfort (the locals are wise to this, and many came armed with cushions).
Attractive as the acoustic is, I'm not sure the Voglers have yet fully mastered the knack of dealing with such an intimate venue. Their style as heard in Drumcliffe is very much in the public mould - no private conversations here, but solidly argumentative cut and thrust, intended to be picked up clearly by anyone in the back row in a large auditorium.
In a confined space, such a manner can strike the listener as either supremely exciting or a bit of a harangue. And, though their performances of the classics might well have sounded fine in a larger venue - and were certainly warmly appreciated by the audience at Drumcliffe - I found myself a bit worn down by the intensity.
The Voglers have always been staunch advocates of the more challenging end of 20th-century and contemporary repertoire, and in their own festival they offered John Cage's Four of 1989 plus Counting, a newly-commissioned work for quartet and four loudspeakers by Donnacha Dennehy.
Four is one of a series of Cage's late works given names by the number of players involved. It actually offers an interesting subversion of the motivation which led Cage to the use of chance procedures in the first place. Chance, he hoped, would allow him to eliminate the exercise of his own taste in the act of composing. But the vibrato-less, harmonium-like sustained notes and chords of Four are purest Cage, readily traceable in mood to some of the pre-chance work. Curiously, the six slow movements of Four, at the extremity of un-self-directed composition, are not as far removed as you might think from the extremity of self-concerned composition represented by the six Adagios that make up Shostakovich's final quartet.
Counting is a playful exercise that sets up a number of amusing paradoxes - a live string quartet that appears to be controlled by the sequence of spoken numbers issuing through four loudspeakers, and the gradual immersion of the live quartet in the electronic sounds, the taped spoken numbers undergoing computer transformations to mimic and usurp the musical material of the four musicians. It's an exercise not unlike the endeavours of architects who place the structural supports of their buildings on the outside, as a sort of exoskeleton. Given Dennehy's openness to the kitschness of processed sound, the question has to be, how well will Counting wear on subsequent hearings?
The two guest artists for the inaugural ESB Vogler Spring Festival were pianist Hugh Tinney and clarinetist Ib Hausmann. For me, the highlight among the established classics on offer was their buoyant reading with Vogler cellist Stephan Forck of Beethoven's early Clarinet Trio. Here, the players' agility and deftness muted any sense of overloading in the church's sensitive acoustic.
