The West Cork Chamber Music Festival, in Bantry, reviewed.

West Cork Chamber Music Festival

Bantry, Co Cork

By Michael Dervan

Midweek there's always a day with a difference, as the festival moves from Bantry House to St Brendan's Church in the centre of Bantry, and the programming changes, too. Most years the change has been one of scale. This year, the works in the main concert were no bigger than usual, all string quartets, but with a difference - electronics.

George Crumb's Black Angels dates from 1970, and was written in response to the Vietnam War, when Crumb was at the height of his fame, with a reputation for exploring new sonorities, playing techniques and theatricality of presentation. Black Angels establishes an arresting sound world, with the players called upon, as the composer himself has put it, to use "an arsenal of sounds including shouting, chanting, whistling, gongs, maracas and crystal glasses".

The string-playing techniques enter into new areas, too, and Crumb's imaginativeness in this area continues to fascinate. The subject of the piece is nothing if not big, but Crumb's musical responses are those of a miniaturist. He's fearless and highly successful in winning listeners' attention, but not always good at following through with the message.

Steve Reich's Different Trains of 1988 is also war-related, prompted by the train journeys of the composer's childhood, when, between 1939 and 1942, he shuttled between parents living apart, in New York and Los Angeles. He thought of the very different trains rumbling in Europe in those years, and sought out recordings of Holocaust survivors, as well as the governess who used to accompany him, and an old train porter. Different Trains weaves fragments of their speech into a texture of multiple string quartets, and mingles unforgettably into the mixture the sounds of the trains of the time.

As with Kevin Volans's White Man Sleeps, Different Trains has a textural finish that's unique. Its ever-shifting surface draws the listener towards the often-darker matter of the words, which are fragmented into short phrases, and repeated as musical motifs, which gives them a haunted, obsessive character.

The Smith Quartet are old hands at this kind of repertoire, their sound engineer, David Sheppard, blending the voices almost under the music, so that one had to strain to maintain contact with the actual words. The programme also included Michael Alcorn's The Old Woman of Beare, overambitious in its marriage of word, electronics and live performance, and the rather anodyne-sounding Good Medicine movement from Terry Riley's two-hour quartet, Salome Dances for Peace.

The day opened in Bantry House with Pascal Moraguès and Hugh Tinney as a chalk and cheese, lyrical and dramatic, clarinet and piano pairing in Weber's Grand Duo Concertant. They then moved on to all eight of Bruch's pieces for clarinet, viola (Danilo Rossi) and piano, in finely-turned performances that couldn't quite mask the forgettableness of much of this nostalgic music, in which Bruch, in 1908, was reliving the style of the mid-19th century.

In a late night concert at St Brendan's, Hugh Tinney returned to offer an always well-groomed reading of Schubert's late Piano Sonata in B flat.