West Cork Chamber Music Festival

Assorted venues, Bantry What fires up a composer of string quartets? The first weekend of Bantry’s festival provided an interesting range of answers.

Here’s a cross-section. Czech composer Leos Janacek’s Second Quartet of 1928, subtitled

Intimate Letters,

was inspired by the elderly composer’s passion (unrequited) for a woman who was his junior by 38 years. There was so much heat in the music, he told her, “that if it caught both of us, there’d be just ashes left”.

US composer Jennifer Higdon's 1993 Voices has movement titles – Blitz, Soft Enlacing, and Grace– that allow for a range of evocative responses from performers and listeners.

Beethoven’s Quartet in E minor, Op. 59 No. 2, is from a set of three he wrote for a Russian diplomat and patron of the arts, Count Razumovsky, and into which, in honour of his patron, he incorporated Russian folk material.

Joseph Haydn’s Quartet in B flat, Op. 50 No. 1, is from a set dedicated to the music-loving Friedrich Wilhelm II of Prussia, and comes from a stage in the composer’s copious output of quartets which, as one scholar wittily put it, has come in for “a disproportionate amount of inattention”.

Antonin Dvorak's Quartet in F, Op. 96, is the chamber music equivalent of the New World Symphony, written on a holiday in Iowa, when the Czech composer was soaking up musical influences from his sojourn in America.

Franz Schubert’s Quartet in B flat, D68, is an unfinished work (just two movements were completed), written by a teenager who provided material for family music sessions.

Australian Brett Dean’s Eclipse was written in 2003 in response to the Tampa crisis, which saw Australia at odds wtih the UN over its treatment of Afghan asylum seekers rescued by a Norwegian freighter. Dean has no illusions about the political power of music, but the background, he says, helps explain the work’s “brooding, troubled and at times aggressive features”.

Spanish composer Alberto Posadas's Aborescencias, from a fractal-inspired quartet cycle, Liturgia fractal(2003-7), recasts the string quartet as mini- concerto, pitting the first violin as soloist against a string trio, in a work that, as it were, takes a magnifying glass to minute details of string tone in a way that sometimes emulates the world of the electronic studio.

If all the Bantry festival did was remind one over three days of the peculiarly protean nature of the string quartet, renowned as the most abstract, most intimate, most demanding of genres, its achievement would already be considerable. But the festival runs for nine days, and although quartets are at its core, most of the music is actually for more mixed formations.

The repertoire is not the only fascination. The music I’ve listed (which omits mention of quartets by Ravel, Ligeti and the little- known 19th-century Frenchman, Georges Onslow) was played by four ensembles heard in two radically different acoustics, the drily-constraining but beautiful library at Bantry House, and the freer, more immediately impactful sound of St Brendan’s Church.

And the standout memories of the three days? France's Quatuor Diotima's glowingly sensual account of Ravel's Quartet. America's Pacifica Quartet delivering a different RazumovskyQuartet (Op. 59 No. 3 in C) with perfect clarity and balance. And the musically sparkling baroque shenanigans of Norway's Barokksolistene, whose verbal slapstick in introductions to pieces by Telemann would once have have won them a place on the Morecambe and Wise Show.

(The festival runs until Sat)