The West Cork Chamber Music Festival and Pipeworks Festival reviewed.

West Cork Chamber Music Festival

Bantry, Co Cork

The West Cork Chamber Music Festival has always had a much more fruitful relationship with the music of the last 100 years than with the wide field of what's still called early music. The programming of three of Bach's Brandenburg Concertos might seem on paper to be this year's most interesting gesture towards the music of the more distant past, but that's not how it has been turning out. The morning coffee concert performances, Brandenburgs 3 and 4 have been highly energised but rather rough-edged affairs, a kind of 21st-century style of sewing-machine Bach, more shapely than its 20th-century counterpart, but locked in too metronomic a groove all the same.

The strongest early music interest came in the Rosamunde String Quartet's pairings of four-part fantasias, originally for viols, by Henry Purcell (all written in June 1680) with string quartets by Shostakovich (dating from 1960 and 1974). Purcell is one of those composers whose more adventurous music seems to stand outside of its own time. In fact, the fantasias were harking back to an out-of-date style at the time of their composition. But there's something in their harmonic freedom, their readiness to surprise with unexpected steps and leaps, which made the linkage to the 20th century seem almost seamless.

The fantasias don't sound quite as well on violins, viola and cello as they do on the instruments of the viol family, but they still sounded pretty good in the Rosamunde's spare yet intense readings - working the other way, with Shostakovich on viols, is surely a total non-starter. The players' full panoply of 21st-century expressive devices were put to pointed use in Shostakovich's Eighth Quartet (written in Dresden and with a dedication "In memory of the victims of fascism and war"). The Fifteenth Quartet, a dark journey of six slow movements, was somewhat less amenable to the lavishness of resource that was applied. Sometimes a simpler manner can yield a greater eloquence.

Much the same could be said of the Leopold Trio's handling of Dmitry Sitkovetsky's string trio arrangement of Bach's Goldberg Variations. The playing itself was a wonder to the ear. But the dazzling displays of violinist Isabelle van Keulen and viola-player Lawrence Power somehow pushed Bach's miraculous invention into the background.

Cellist Kate Gould's more sober path was altogether more evocative of the original.

The Leopolds were, however, perfectly matched with a selection of György Kurtág's Signs, Games and Messages, a series of short pieces begun in 1989 which are at once crude and cryptic, yet also as full of deep and meaningful resonances as the illogical logic of the world of dreams.

The Leopolds ensured that the music moved as freely on the cusp of silence as it did when shattering that silence.

There are shadows of pastiche in Kurtág's work, though none as blatant as those in Alfred Schnittke's Suite in the Old Style, which the duo of Vadim Gluzman (violin) and Mihaela Ursuleasa (piano) tended to play up too much. These musicians were on much more amenable territory in two violin sonatas by Brahms, and Gluzman gave a dazzlingly faithful account of the second of Ysaÿe's sonatas for solo violin, the one dedicated to Jacques Thibaud and haunted by Bach.

The guying element that Gluzman and Ursuleasa brought to the Schnittke was found also in a performance of one of Rossini's youthful string sonatas, played by Patricia Kopatchinskaja and Catherine Leonard (violins), Sarah McMahon (cello), and Chi-Chi Nwanoku (double bass), with Kopatchinskaja and Leonard managing to bring overtones of the composer's famously competitive Cat Duet to bear on some of the imitative writing in the sonata.

The festival's resident quartet, the RTÉ Vanbrugh Quartet, were in top patrician form in Beethoven's late Quartet in F, Op 135, and the Rosamundes were joined by Swiss clarinettist Reto Bieri, for a svelte performance of Brahms's Clarinet Quintet, where the playing offered a fine balance of introversion and extroversion in this always autumnal-seeming work.

By contrast, the Altenberg Trio played Shostakovich acolyte Mieczyslaw Weinberg's Piano Trio of 1945 with a style of exaggeration that made it seem like a piece designed for listeners who were both hard of hearing and musically obtuse enough to need things beaten into them. Antti Siirala was technically commanding but musically overbearing in his recital of Mozart, Brahms and Chopin. And the partnership of soprano Charlotte Riedijk and guitarist Redmond O'Toole failed to gel in songs by Dowland. But O'Toole was like a different musician in the absorbing Nocturnal that Benjamin Britten wrote for Julian Bream.

MICHAEL DERVAN

Pipeworks

Various venues, Dublin

The final concert in the Pipeworks festival of organ and choral music was billed as a 17th-century Lutheran Vespers. The audience in St Patrick's Cathedral heard music by the most famous German figures of the time, Schütz (born 1585), Praetorius (born 1571), and Hassler (born 1564), and by their contemporaries; and all was ably conducted and choreographed by the artistic director of Pipeworks, Mark Duley.

Small pieces were sung by Resurgam, which maintained its reputation as one of the most accomplished choirs on this island. The larger items included polychoral motets and canticles, plus hymns; and these were sung by the combined forces of Resurgam, Cois Cladaigh from Galway, and two Dublin-based choirs, the Mornington Singers and New Dublin Voices, all with support from a chorus of trombones.

This added up to an impressive and sometimes thrilling sonic experience, though after an hour or so it proved a bit bludgeoning. David Leigh provided relief via appropriate organ preludes, and made the continuo playing and accompanying seem the most straightforward thing in the world - which it is not.

Earlier in the week, St Patrick's had been the venue for an extraordinary display of relaxed virtuosity by Carlo Curley. Playing one of his characteristic programmes of transcriptions, lollipops and mainstream works, he demonstrated his unique advocacy for the instrument. His blithe disdain for concepts such as historical performance practice would not please all, but his superlative skill as an entertainer was underlined by his introductory speeches and by the screen projection that enabled the audience to see him at the organ console.

A very different mode of playing was presented by Hans Fagius, one of the jury members in the organ competition. On the still-original 1861 Walker organ in St Audoen's Church (RC), he showed pure musicianship, unsullied by mannerisms or ego. The programme included Benjamin Staern's effective new work, Fluxus, and Widor's Sixth Symphony. This striking instrument was not ideal for the Widor, which requires a tone with much stronger upper-work; but it was perfect for Mendelssohn's Three Preludes and Fugues, Op 37.

St Audeon's has become a home to Dublin's Polish congregation, so it was also the venue for a choral concert by the Academic Choir of the Silesian University of Technology, Gliwice. In its programme of Polish and other music from the Renaissance to the present it was unfortunate that some lines, noticeably the sopranos, tended to pull pitch down. But in other respects this was a strong concert, brimming with characterful tone and showing subtle musicianship.

For this year's organ competition, 38 applicants were whittled down to 16 for the semi-finals; and the final in Christ Church Cathedral featured just three. To this pair of ears there was no self-evident winner; and the freely chosen programmes were not always persuasive.

It might be significant that the winner, Joseph Ripka (US), played the programme that showed the strongest balance of cohesion and contrast.

In second place came Jonathan Oldegarm (Canada), and the third-placed competitor was Christopher T Petit (US).

MARTIN ADAMS