Bantry brings it back to basics

THE ARTS:THERE WAS no doubting who was the big star of the 2009 West Cork Chamber Music Festival. It was the Russian violinist Alina Ibragimova, and she was in Bantry with just one task on her agenda – to play Bach, writes MICHAEL DERVAN

Ibragimova, still in her mid-20s, is a slender figure. But her Bach is granitic, monumental. She plays the works for solo violin – in Bantry she offered the Partitas in B minor and D minor – completely without the vibrato that has been such a crutch for violinists since sometime in the late 19th century. If the evidence from the earliest recordings is to be believed – and Brahms’s great friend Joseph Joachim left some recordings of Bach – vibrato in the romantic era was an awful lot lighter than it later became.

Ibragimova’s eschewal of vibrato is no mere caprice. She shows an acute awareness of how the absence of vibrato redefines the function of the bowing arm. Without vibrato, there’s nowhere to hide. The shape of a phrase is exactly what the bowing defines it to be. There’s no wobble to cloud the issue. And Ibragimova seems to have absorbed the full implications of her unusual course. Her intonation is uncannily pure, as it needs to be. And she plays with what you might call an Occam’s razor sensibility, steering away from the kind of stop-go rubato that many players adopt in this most challenging of repertoires.

The effect of her playing is startling, even shocking. It’s as if you were to hear the leader of a nation cast off all spin and subterfuge, and tell what was clearly the undiluted truth. And it’s not just shocking. It’s exhilarating, and dangerous-sounding, too. The bareness of the slow Sarabandes is like something pared back to essentials. The daring of the speedier playing – and she takes certain movements faster than is quite comfortable – has the excitement of a high-wire act that leaves some scrapes and bruises in the pursuit of a probably unattainable perfection. In short, Ibragimova’s playing is as uncompromising as the music itself, music which, after nearly three centuries, still drives performers to the very borders of the possible.

Ibragimova also played both of Bach's solo violin concertos, with a one-to-a-part orchestra provided by the members of the Callino String Quartet, double bassist Niek de Groot, and harpsichordist Malcolm Proud. Even with just moments of vibrato on the longest notes, these were also edge-of-the-seat performances, with the Callinos seeming in full accord with the remarkable soloist. In other concerts, the Callinos – celebrating their 10th birthday at the festival where they played together for the first time – made rather heavy weather of Bartók's heavy weatherish Third Quartet, and sang sweetly with silvery-toned viola-player Jennifer Stumm in the teenage Mendelssohn's gorgeous String Quintet in A, a piece that's recognisably by the genius who penned the Midsummer Night's Dream Overtureand the Octetfor strings.

The Bantry festival always includes an amount of new music, or at least music that’s new to Irish audiences. This year’s focus was largely on Eastern Europe and Russia. Three works by Russian composer Lera Auerbach were heard. The earliest of these was begun in 1991, when, as a 17-year-old on tour in the US, she decided to defect, just six months before the fall of the Soviet Union.

The music, played by the composer on piano with Marlene Hemmer (violin) and Brian O’Kane (cello), ranges from giddy and grotesque to restrained and sombre. But it’s a lot less exaggerated in manner than the later pieces that were heard: the String Quartet No 3 (Cetera desunt) of 2006 and the 24 Preludes for piano of 1999.

Auerbach, who is an engaging speaker (and a writer, too – she stayed on in Bantry for the West Cork Literary Festival), favours a heavy emotional style that becomes self-defeating, like the effect of a stormy, stirring political speech that makes no points worth remembering; all manner, no content. Auerbach also gave a late-night performance of Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition. Her playing was so full of egregious alterations and additions – extra notes, fragments of countermelody, tremolos, altered rhythmic patterns – that it amounted to nothing less than an unmitigated travesty.

GEORGIAN COMPOSERGiya Kancheli was in Bantry, too, for the Irish premières of his Exil(1994), a song cycle for soprano (Maacha Deubner) and ensemble with texts ranging from Psalm 23 to Paul Celan, and the Quintet for flute and string quartet ( Ninna Nanna), written for the National Flute Association in the US last year. The flute plays a big part in Exil, too, with alto and bass flutes in the flesh (Janne Thomsen), and more ethereal flute sounds from a synthesizer (John Godfrey). Both works show an uncanny ear for sonority, but the threads and tendrils of Exil, its murmurs, glows and echoes, struggled to sustain its almost unbearably slow pace and its length. Ninna Nanna(played by Thomsen with the Quatuor Danel) spent a lot of time, too, on the cusp of silence, its atmosphere evoking the stillness of a hazy memory.

The programme offered two works by Latvian Peteris Vasks, his piano trio Episodi e Canto Perpetuo, a 1985 homage to Messiaen played by the Storioni Trio, and the Piano Quartet, a commission for the 2001 West Cork Chamber Music Festival, played by Hagai Shaham (violin), Jennifer Stumm (viola), David Geringas (cello) and Alexander Melnikov (piano). Both works strive for effects that they don't quite achieve. The stylistically scatter-gun trio is the more successful of the two, though its Messiaen references are a bit too blatant for comfort. The piano quartet contains far too much ranting. Its aggressive writing is often hollow and much of it is seriously over-extended. The cello gets the best of the proceedings, and Geringas made the most of his opportunities.

A far stronger impression was made by Sofia Gubaidulina's On the Edge of the Abyssfor solo cello (Marc Coppey), six cellos and two waterphones, all conducted by Keith Pascoe. Waterphones look like a kind of nail violin, but, obviously, with a reservoir for water. They create a thin, eerie sound, which lingers, and can be modified by tilting, to cause movement of the water. Gubaidulina is a painstaking conqueror of new sounds, and she kept the ear fully engaged in this piece.

Quatuor Danel played the Fourth Quartet of 1997 by French composer Pascal Dusapin, and laid it out with exemplary lucidity, like a lesson in origami that allowed one, for a moment at least, to see where and why every fold had to go.

Other things that stood out included a series of Mozart wind serenades (in performances that were rustically robust rather than subtle), and the chamber-music pianism of Jeremy Menuhin (which graced piano quartets by Fauré and Brahms).

The West Cork Chamber Music Festival invests in the future through its master classes for young ensembles, and provides a public performing platform for them, too. This year, the greatest promise was shown by Róisín Walters, Michael Trainor, Aiveen Gallagher and David McCann, whose performance of Haydn’s Quartet in C, Op 20 No 2, had a pointed stylishness and an invigorating freshness that made a deep impression.