West Cork Chamber

Beethoven's Grosse Fuge is one of those pieces which invites metaphors involving Mount Everest. But Everest has been scaled, and the Grosse Fugue is in crucial ways likely to remain unmastered. In fact, that very unmasterability is part of what makes it so fascinating, a piece that still sounds utterly modern and taxes players and listeners alike with unique intensity.

It's easy to see why it would attract those lords of the 20th century, the Arditti Quartet, whose repertoire doesn't otherwise stretch back beyond the early works of Bartok and the Second Viennese School. They deliver this most extraordinary of fugues with an energy that leaves the listener feeling wet and windswept, at once drained and exhilarated.

It was interesting to hear the Arditti's Beethoven at the West Cork Chamber Music Festival on Monday, the same day as the period-performance specialists, the Quatuor Mosaiques, played Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven.

The Mosaiques have made quite an impression on disc, often probing, and with an especially rewarding textural depth. Their playing in Bantry, however, was mostly pallid, and they managed to bring a sense of slack routine even to Beethoven's great C sharp minor Quartet.

It was the cellist, Christophe Coin, who provided most of the expressive lift to the group's playing, and it was he also who gave the most vivid impression of genuine historical distance from the conventions of quartet-playing as they are heard today.

The day's other offerings included a delightfully sprightly performance of Janacek's Mladi (Youth), that most remarkable of generational leaps by a 70-year-old, from the Octuor Paris-Bastille, and a midday song recital by soprano Patricia Rozario, unfailingly beautiful of voice, and at her most evocative in songs by Obradors and Villa-Lobos.

The West Cork Chamber Music Festival runs until Sunday. Booking: 027-61576