Bewitched in Bantry

Has the music-lover been found yet, who has been to the West Cork Chamber Music Festival in Bantry and has not come away bewitched? The festival, launched in 1996, may be a relative newcomer, but has been casting its spell from the very start.

What is it that makes Bantry so special? Well, there's the setting, Bantry House, where, out of doors, the views across Bantry Bay are all-weather beautiful and, indoors, the layout and ambience promote an atmosphere that's intimate and musically conducive.

The pool of musicians brought together for the festival - where they form and re-form in a myriad of combinations - creates a sort of extended family for the duration. Mixing these musical combinations through individual programmes makes for a revitalising freshness, and having musicians attending each other's performances and mingling freely with the audiences adds to the sense of normal concert proprieties and boundaries being re-defined. And Bantry looks to the future, too, with integrated master classes and, this year, a lunchtime series for young performers.

All of this, of course, would be just so much hot air if it weren't for the often extraordinary quality of the performances themselves. The presence of the legendary Borodin String Quartet led to a permeating Russian flavour this year, with a strong emphasis on the chamber music of Shostakovich, an area of his work more personal than the familiar public oratory of the popular symphonies and less concerned with securing the sanction of interfering Soviet authority.

The second half of the festival brought the seven Alexander Blok settings of Op. 127 for soprano (Juanita Lascarro), cello (Anne Gastinel), violin (Ida Levin) and piano (Joanna MacGregor). These are spare (the three instruments are heard together only at the end), intense, disturbing, and were sung with a beautiful equanimity by Lascarro which contrasted with the deeper, often starker and chillier, probings of the instrumentalists.

Shostakovich knew his Fifteenth Quartet would be his last ("Death is circling all around me") and cast it in seven, uninterrupted slow movements, the contents distilled to essential purity. The Borodin Quartet, playing by candlelight, set a course of inscrutable objectivity - measured of movement and scrupulous of nuance - that cut right to the heart of this most extraordinarily concentrated piece.

Outstanding also was a piece by a Russian of a later generation, the Piano Quintet that Alfred Schnittke began in 1972 as a response to his mother's death but didn't succeed in finishing until 1976. Its range of manners is typically wide, from sweetness to violence, with the piano's often bare gestures set against entangled, sometimes microtonal, lines from the strings.

It was delivered with sharp colours and vivid responses by the RTE Vanbrugh Quartet and Joanna MacGregor, who later in the evening gave an engrossing, decidedly un-purist, musically risky reading of Bach's Art of Fugue that shed all notions of didacticism in favour of an animated and animating picture of this intellectually astonishing and thoroughly gripping work.

The Irish composers represented at this year's festival were Ian Wilson and Raymond Deane. The Vanbrughs, the festival's founding and anchor quartet, premiered Deane's specially commissioned Brown Studies. The musical ideas here are clear and strong. Deane is articulate and forceful in summoning material but (and perhaps this is intentional) less purposeful in the working out of it. It may be that the word "studies" in the title explains why the material is taken just so far and no further, or that the expressive world of the Vanbrugh's performing style here linked the music too firmly to the past rather than seeing how it might be charting a path into the future. Wilson's Seven Last Words, his Piano Trio No. 2, treads a simpler path with more immediate effectiveness, and was played with lavish tonal resources by Levin, Gastinel, and MacGregor.

The Russian theme threw up a few real rarities, the most interesting of which was a quartet by Arensky for the unusual combination of violin, viola, and two cellos (the Leopold String Trio plus Gastinel). It's from this piece that Arensky's orchestral Variations on a theme of Tchaikovsky are taken, and the movement sounds altogether more persuasive in its original, bottom-rich context than its later, more popular guise.

In the second half of the festival, pianist MarcAndre Hamelin found his form, seductively charming with the Vanbrughs in Dvorak's Piano Quintet, Op. 81, and displaying a winning combination of fleetness and gentleness in a softly-contoured performance of Faure's First Piano Quartet with the Leopolds.

The closing concert always endeavours to have something of the flavour of a grand finale, this year proposing Tchaikovsky's string sextet, Souvenir de Florence, with the Borodins and two members of the Vanbrughs, viola-player Simon Aspell and cellist (and festival artistic director), Christopher Marwood. The Borodin's tonal leanness, internal clarity, tightness of spring and sharpness of rhythm dominated in what was surely one of the most exuberantly energetic performances of an excitingly-crammed week of chamber music.