After Wednesday's two concerts, which had restricted themselves to music from the late 20th century, it was business as usual at the West Cork Chamber Music Festival on Thursday. But the not-too-distant past wasn't entirely neglected. The main evening concert opened with the 1982 Horn Trio by Gyumlaut Orgy Ligeti. It seems fitting that a work commissioned as a companion piece to the Brahms Horn Trio should earn itself the reputation of being the finest horn trio to be written since the Brahms. The dryness of the acoustics in Bantry House worked strongly in the music's favour, making sure the violin (the excellent Viviane Hagner) wasn't swamped in the reverberation of the horn (the adaptable Richard Watkins). The trio of performers was completed by Aleksandar Madzar, a tower of strength at the piano, and the finale - marked Lamento, the work's finest movement - made its expected, shattering impact.
The Horn Trio was a pivotal work in Ligeti's output, clearing the way for the series of piano Etudes that followed. So too, nearly 75 years earlier, Schoenberg's Second String Quartet heralded a new phase, not just in its composer's work, but in music in general: the arrival of what came (much to Schoenberg's annoyance) to be called "atonality".
The quartet may dispense with familiar markers but it remains a taut and cogent piece which, in Thursday's late-night concert, was played with a sharp ear for its contrapuntal riches by the RTE Vanbrugh String Quartet. The day's offerings also included a rather anaemic celebration of the Bach family from the Limoges Baroque Ensemble, and an altogether more memorable, sweetly intimate account of Dvorak's folk-influenced String Sextet in A, Op 48, in which the Panocha Quartet was joined by two members of the Vanbrugh, Simon Aspell and Christopher Marwood.
The thread connecting Friday's concerts at the West Cork Chamber Music Festival was one of commemoration.
It ran from Antoine Forqueray's celebration of a fellow composer in La Leclair (the brightest spot in the Limoges Baroque Ensemble's French-flavoured midday programme) to Rachmaninov's Trio Elegiaque in D minor, written in memory of Tchaikovsky, and featured in the late-night concert by the Bekova Trio.
The trio, three sisters from Kazakhstan, took a liberal and ultimately disfiguring approach to a piece that is dangerously tilted in favour of the piano. Eleonora Bekova showed herself to be a player of restricted tonal colour and volume. She played mostly too loud and with a great deal of smearing from a heavy use of the sustaining pedal.
Earlier in the evening there was a finely-balanced account of another overwrought composer commemoration, Schnittke's 1985 String Trio, written in nagging, distorting-mirror, expressionist style for the centenary of the birth of Alban Berg; it was played with minutely-detailed sensitivity by Viviane Hagner (violin), Tatjana Masurenko (viola) and Quirine Viersen (cello). Tony Curtis celebrated the life of poet Michael Hartnett with readings which cut straight to Poulenc's often piercing Elegy for horn (Richard Watkins) and piano (Hugh Tinney), written in memory of the great horn player, Dennis Brain.
The day brought a memorable cello and piano recital from Dutch cellist Quirine Viersen and Hugh Tinney. They may not have seen eye to eye in Debussy's Sonata, but they were a hand-in-glove partnership in Schumann's Fantasy Pieces, Op. 73, which I've rarely heard sound so well in a string/piano combination, and in the Shostakovich Sonata.
Viersen is a remarkable player, avoiding all the temptations of grandiosity her instrument offers, and adding to its range a violin-like nimbleness and immediacy of articulation. Tinney matched her all the way, with a deftness and spring that hasn't been heard much in his playing of late.
