Adelai..........................................Beethoven
Klavierstⁿck in E flat minor D946 o1............Schubert
2 Songs.........................................Beethoven
Sonata in A minor 664...........................Schubert
Nacht und TrΣume..........................................Schubert
Moonlight Sonata..........................................Beethoven
Three Songs...........................................Schubert
32 Variations in C minor........................Beethoven
Saturday's recital at the Debis AirFinance Killaloe Music Festival was devoted to songs and works for piano by Beethoven and Schubert. Taking duration into account, it was less than either a full piano or song recital, while the internal juxtapositions were so well conceived that the totality seemed much richer than a full evening of song or piano music might have been, either alone or in sequence.
On the one hand there were overt linkages - Schubert's Nacht und TrΣume (Night and Dreams) before Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata - while on the other there was the illumination of the highly contrasted nature of the two composers' success in the different media. Both men wrote sonatas and characterful piano pieces with great success, Beethoven more consistently than Schubert - but Beethoven's formality keeps even the best of his songs so much more emotionally remote than Schubert's.
The English tenor Rufus Mⁿller is a tactful singer, clear-voiced and clear-headed. He doesn't labour the words or the vocal line, and with Maria Joπo Pires - a keyboard partner both unassuming and colouristically complex - the two performers created an intriguing partnership.
In her solo Schubert, Maria Joπo Pires captured the appeal of the surface without losing sight of the frequent undertow of melancholy, and in Beethoven she impressively ran the gamut from the timeless calm of the opening of the Moonlight to the frequently stormy rigour of the Variations in C minor.
She shaped the music primarily as a melodist, but her voicing of chords and textures is so varied and responsive that little in the harmonic domain, however reticently expressed, is actually lost. Hers is a fascinating style that contrives to be at once artless, commanding and spell-binding.
On Friday, the young Irish early-music ensemble, Phantasticus (Claire Duff, violin, Laoise O'Brien, recorders, Nicholas Milne, viola da gamba, Richard Sweeney, lute and theorbo) played works by Telemann, Selma y Salaverde, Biber and Castello. The playing took some time to warm up, but warm up it did. As the music became more extravagant and elaborate in melodic line, so the musicians' conviction and enthusiasm grew to match. As a programme calculated to leave listeners fully wound up in tension and excitement, it worked a treat.
