At the heart of the third day of the West Cork Chamber Music Festival was a performance of Shostakovich's Third Quartet in the masterly hands of the Borodin Quartet. This is one of those early post-war works which, in the artistically repressive atmosphere of the Soviet Union of the time, had to be withdrawn from public view.

As Fyodor Druzhinin of the Beethoven Quartet, who premiered most of Shostakovich's quartets, explained: "Following the best traditions of Russian art, the murky and ugly side of terror, repression and suffering lead us finally to the tragic apotheosis of the Finale of the Fifth Symphony, and to the mysterious transformation into eternal light and conciliation in the Third Quartet and the Viola Sonata."

The burden of extra-musical messages was apparent throughout the Borodin's performance - in the upbeat simplicity of the opening, the raw vehemence of the third movement, the heaviness of the soul pressing on the fourth, and through the revisitings that lead to the resolution of the finale.

There's an implacability in their handling of this music that in other contexts would be merely deadpan, but here has the effect of magnifying and universalising what is ultimately an experience to leave you with a shiver.

There's a comparable firmness of spine and severity in their Beethoven, the playing, as ever, a miracle of the art of drawing bow-hair across stretched string. But in their late-night performance of the Quartet in A minor, Op 132, one felt a want of flexibility, a greater sense of yielding, to encompass an essential warmth that, in spite of the mesmerising finish of the playing, seemed under-expressed.

Earlier in the day, the violin and piano duo of Ida Levin and MarcAndre Hamelin had ventured rather anaemically through a Mozart sonata (K380 in E flat) and Dvorak's set of Four Romantic Pieces, before finding a greater involvement in the finer of Prokofiev's two violin sonatas, the one in F minor, Op 80.

Ida Levin was later joined by cellist Anne Gastinel and pianist Joanna MacGregor in Ravel's A minor Piano Trio, where the playing fully caught the fantastical, eerie, atavistic and exotic character of a piece all too often marred in performance by romantic over-kill.