Russian star shines in west Cork

Michael Dervan hears an arresting soprano at the West Cork Chamber Music Festival

The West Cork Chamber Music Festival has a very good track record when it comes to introducing singers to Irish audiences. This year's discovery was the Russian mezzo soprano Lyudmila Shkirtil.

She cuts a tall, imposing figure on stage, and her voice is ample, firm and clear. She produces it with apparent ease, and uses it as if singing were the most natural mode of expression. She has that enviable quality of always seeming to communicate something that matters deeply. And she does so with a beauty that's immediately arresting, though the beauty seems to be just there rather than something that has to be worked at or prioritised.

Her final festival performance, at St Brendan's Church on Thursday, was of the 1977 song-cycle Russia Cast Adrift (or A Russia Flying Away as the festival translation put it) by the little-known Georgi Sviridov (1915-98).

Sviridov, a pupil of Shostakovich who succeeded his teacher as first secretary of the RSFSR Union of Composers in 1968, is best known for his choral and vocal music. The song-cycle, or "vocal poem", sets richly symbolic poems by Sergei Yesenin in a style that ranges from the artlessly simple to the insistently apocalyptic.

Shkirtil and her pianist Yuri Serov held one's attention at every moment, though the music itself, for all its impact, did at times seem to be simplistic as well as simple.

There were similar issues raised in French composer Olivier Greif's Sonate de Requiem for cello and piano. Greif (1950-2000), who composed a piece called Le triomphe de la tonalité in 1972 (between his Twelfth and Thirteenth Piano Sonatas), wrote this cello sonata as a 49-minute piece in 1979, and revised it down to 27 minutes in 1993.

It is, he said, a meditation on death as loss, as a journey and as contemplation, and it sounds like an expressionist embodiment of Mahler meeting Schnittke in the chamber music domain, with effects from spun-sugar, music-box sweetness to no-holds-barred child-like ranting and anger. The performance by Emmanuelle Bertrand and Pascal Amoyel was little short of amazing, but even in its shorter version the piece seemed unreasonably overblown.

There is extremism, too, in the music of the highly reclusive Galina Ustvolskaya (born 1919) who, like Sviridov, was one of Shostakovich's earliest composition students. She also had an intimate relationship with the great composer (she turned down his marriage proposal after the death of his first wife), and Shostakovich greatly admired her harsh musical style. Up until the early 1960s she also wrote pieces that conformed to Soviet orthodoxy, but she has since withdrawn these works.

The pieces she cared about sometimes waited decades to be heard in public. Her Clarinet Trio of 1949, played in Bantry by Jörg Widmann (clarinet), Patrycja Piekutoswka (violin), and Konstantin Lifschitz (piano), was not premiered until 1968, although Shostakovich was able to quote from it in his Fifth String Quartet of 1952.

The trio is still a striking work, literally so, with the piano-writing sometimes adopting a note-by-note, blow-by-blow manner, not always leavened by the other instruments. Lifschitz and Widmann penetrated the strangely gripping style with far greater success than Piekutowska, whose sometimes strained delivery suffered from the tonal limitations which affected her other performances during the festival.

Her manner, which for me had something of the effect of a high-revving but low-power engine, was heard at its best in the Second Violin Sonata of her compatriot, Krzysztof Penderecki, where pianist Beata Belinska was a tower of strength.

The festival also offered a performance of Penderecki's Sextet for clarinet (Widmann), horn (Premysl Vojta), string trio (members of the Prazák Quartet) and piano (Finghin Collins).

Like the sonata, this dates from 2000 and is in a strongly gestural, loosely romantic style that in its own way is as remarkable for its narrative strength as the composer's early avant-garde works were for their colouristic inventiveness. The performance packed a real punch, with Collins, on the top of his form, serving as a potent driving force.

Not everything this year was of the same high performing standard, with two of the visiting groups, the ASCH Trio and the Rosamunde Trio, sounding dully routine. The members of both groups were involved in collaborations where their failures of animation became something of musical burden to the other players. Violinist Catherine Leonard, leading a performance of Mozart's Divertimento in F, K247, probably achieved the most in countering the flatness of the ASCH's style.

The highly-regarded Israeli flautist Sharon Bezaly made some ravishing sounds, but played with a softness which often left her so buried in the texture of the music that she was not always exactly easy to hear. Her best outing was in trios of mixed instrumentation by Martinu, Duruflé and Weber with Bertrand, Collins and viola player Rebecca Jones.

The most celebrated viola-player in this year's line-up, Kim Kashkashian, was heard to best effect with pianist Lydia Artimiw in Hindemith's Sonata, Op 11 No 4, an early work where the soon-to-be dispelled tokens of the influence of Brahms are still to be heard (I missed the duo's performance of the Shostakovich Viola Sonata).

Singapore's T'ang Quartet maintained their high standard in a midday programme of Schulhoff, Sculthorpe (with some magical bird-song effects) and Hindemith (now in his enfant-terrible stage). The Carducci Quartet gave an airing to the 1957 Second Quartet by Irish composer Brian Boydell (a man surely due a comprehensive posthumous survey).

The closing concert included a bells-and-whistles performance of Paul Moravec's slick, showy, Pulitzer Prize winning Tempest Fantasy (Carol McGonnell, clarinet, Charles Owen, piano, with Leonard and Bertrand), and a romantic indulgence as filling as over-dosing in a Viennese café, the late Octet by Max Bruch, still writing in 1920 as if still in the world of Mendelssohn and Schumann.

The RTÉ Vanbrugh Quartet, and members of the Prazák Quartet with Malachy Robinson (double bass), took to it with a glee that was fully shared by the audience.