One of the charms of the West Cork Chamber Music Festival is that it includes a high percentage of what you might call bespoke performances. Musicians who may have never met, let alone worked together, rehearse and offer the results in public concerts. The results are often wonderful, but the chemistry can't be guaranteed to work, and the programme on Friday had more than its fair share of mismatches.
The partnership of the Moscow-based Dominant String Quartet and its musical mentor, Valentin Berlinsky (cellist of the great Borodin Quartet), shouldn't have been one, but it was. The problem in Schubert's Quintet in C wasn't really the disparity between Berlinsky and his young acolytes, apparent though that was. The shortcomings lay in the approach to this sublime music, stretches of which were made to sound like a flat technical exercise.
The Dominants' playing was defined by absences. The Mozart playing at the Coffee Concert - by Francois Leleux (oboe), David Ehrlich and Daniel Hope (violins), James Boyd (viola) and Richard Lester (cello) - was quite the opposite. The delivery of the Oboe Quartet, the Duo in G for violin and viola, and the Divertimento in D, K136, tended towards that all-purpose, off-the-peg expressiveness which does reliable service in much music of the 19th century, but sits uncomfortably in works from other periods. It was Lester who ploughed the lone, independent, consistently Mozart-sensitive line.
There was a similar stylistic split, later in the day, in a performance of Mozart's E flat Major Piano Quartet by Kris Bezuidenhout (piano), Daniel Hope (violin), James Boyd (viola) and Guido Schiefen (cello). Bezuidenhout, a player who lacks for nothing in attitude, sculpted his phrases in high relief and embellished frequently and freely. His three colleagues kept at a distant arm's length from his historically informed performance style, only daring a tiny dip into the waters he was fully immersed in.
The final music of the evening, viol duets by Marin Marais (played by Laurence Dreyfus and Markku Luo lajan-Mikkola with lutenist Thomas C. Boysen), were as balm after the emptiness of the earlier Schubert. The mournful spirals of the Tombeau pour Monsieur Meliton made a profound impression in the darkened library at Bantry House.
