Michael Dervanattended the Callino & Friends string quartet weekend in Cork

Callino & Friends, Church of St Matthias, Ballydehob, Bantry House, Co Cork

The Callino Quartet that opened its second Callino & Friends weekend in west Cork on Friday is not the same Callino Quartet that gave a similar series of concerts last Easter.

There have been two changes in the line-up, one brought about through the arrival of new member Michaela Girardi as second violinist, the other occasioned by previous second violinist Sarah Sexton moving into the leader's position vacated by Ioana Petcu-Colan.

By string quartet standards this is a serious but not necessarily a radical change. After all, there are a number of distinguished quartets - including America's leading quartet, the Emersons, and Spain's Cuarteto Casals among younger ensembles - where the two violinists alternate roles. And with two of the original members still involved, the Callinos are certainly far from the transformations which saw one of the most famous of 20th-century ensembles, the Budapest Quartet, spend most of its life with an all-Russian line-up rather than the all-Hungarian one it had started out with.

And yet the Callino's opening performance of the extraordinary, rapt sequence of slow movements that make up Haydn's hour-long Seven Last Words of Our Saviour on the Crosswas unlike anything I have heard from this group before. It was like a journey into the historical past of string quartet playing, a reminder that, back in the 19th century, the leader was frequently a dominating presence, with the other players taking an accompanying role.

The effect on Friday was magnified by the generous acoustic of the Church of St Matthias in Ballydehob, which conveyed the group's sound with an almost larger-than-life richness, and, if anything, exaggerated the extent to which Sexton was projecting more strongly than her colleagues.

The effect was magnified also by aspects of Sexton's own performing style. She came across as a very self-consciously correct musician, textbook-aware in terms of articulation and distribution of stresses, but a little constrained, too, by the exercise, with more of the formality of, say, a newsreader than the rise and fall or free flow of a naturally fluctuating conversation.

The rest of the programme was given in the more familiar and much drier acoustic of Bantry House. In the quartet performances I heard over the first three days of the series, it was in an early quartet by Beethoven, the Quartet in D, Op, 18 No 3, that the most natural sense of give and take was achieved. The technical finish of the new line-up is more consistent and solid than the Callinos achieved this time last year. But it certainly sounds as if the group is still in a settling down period.

The weekend saw the Callinos expanding for a single quintet, with clarinettist Carol McGonnell joining them for a performance of the late Clarinet Quintet by Brahms. Apart from a few flashes of bright and overt virtuosity, this is an anti-soloistic work for the clarinettist. The instrument is woven in and around the string instruments, subtly creating sounds and textures that were at the time utterly new to the world of music.

McGonnell was faithful and self-effacing, asserting her personality in the improvisational flourishes of the slow movement. However, given the current balance favoured by the Callinos she was often heard as less the equal among peers than Brahms had clearly planned for.

The major non-string quartet performances I heard were of César Franck's Violin Sonata, Catherine Leonard sweetly impassioned on violin, Finghin Collins at times a bit too domineering in his command of the piano part, and Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time (McGonnell, Leonard, the Callino's cellist Sarah McMahon, and Collins).

The Messiaen, famously written and premiered in a prisoner-of-war camp during the second World War, broaches the subject of eternity, with most modern performances seeing that as an invitation for a kind of time-stilling slowness. It's a work that is almost unfailing in performance, blending virtuosity and spirituality, showmanship and inwardness in a way that's unique in the chamber music repertoire. The Bantry performance was a little unsettled, not quite bedded in, with the highlight coming at the very end, in an account of the closing violin and piano movement, Louange à l'Immortalité de Jésus (Praise to the Immortality of Jesus), that was ravishing in effect, despite the rhythmic irregularities of the playing.