Excellent moments in an extraordinary testament to the human spirit

Music Programmes

Kilkenny Arts Festival

If the music programmes of Kilkenny Arts Festival were planned to reach a peak on the final day, it was a plan that didn't quite come off.

Both the baroque and chamber-music strands hit their highest spots on Saturday. But the comedown was gentle, with Sunday's final baroque programme, at lunchtime in the Parade Tower of Kilkenny Castle, and the closing chamber concert, at 6 p.m. in St Canice's Cathedral, providing special rewards of their own.

Maya Homburger showed the right balance of fantasy and logic in delivering the vertiginous rhetorical flourishes of two violin sonatas by the early 17th-century Italian Dario Castello.

The excitement of the journey was intensified by the keen rapport with harpsichordist Malcolm Proud.

Proud's own solo, the Passacaglia In G Minor from Georg Muffat's Apparatus Musico-Organisticus, was done in that rock-solid mode this performer likes to bring to the clearest of structures.

In the Muffat, his music-making moved - in both senses - with ineluctable force. The three other pieces, by Vivaldi (the Cello Sonata In A Minor, RV43, from Gesine Queyras), Telemann (an Oboe Sonata In E Flat from Marcel Ponseele) and Handel (the Trio Sonata In B Flat, HWV380) seemed somehow lighter pleasures beside the Castello and Muffat.

The major work in the closing concert was Messiaen's Quartet For The End Of Time, that extraordinary testament to the durability of the human spirit, which was written and premiered in a prisoner-of-war camp during the second World War.

This is a piece demanding special concentration from both players and listeners, with protracted sections unfolding in a rapt stillness, broken by irregularly jagged rhythms.

Sunday's performance, with Roland van Spaendonck (clarinet), Priya Mitchell (violin), Jean-Guihen Queyras (cello) and Jerome Ducros (piano), was one of those with many excellent moments that surpassed the effect of the whole.

Ravel's Sonata For Violin And Cello is a work that has begun to come into its own in recent years, its odd austerity showing a side of the composer little suspected by those who know only his most popular works.

Christine Busch (violin) and Queyras played it with a reserve that, in spite of a disruptive lapse in the finale, had the unusual effect of expanding the music's expressive domain.

Van Spaendonck and Ducros's sharply etched opening performance of Berg's Four Pieces For Clarinet And Piano was not only enjoyable in itself, but also served to create an atmosphere in which the Ravel could flourish.