Festival goes from strength to strength

Introduction and Allegro - > Elgar Violin

Concerto No 2 - > Prokofiev Triple

Concerto - > Beethoven

The Dublin launch of this year's West Cork Chamber Music Festival was a musical event, bringing to the stage of the National Concert Hall some of the musician familiar to festival regulars.

RTE's director general Bob Collins announced increased support from RTE, now the festival's principal sponsor, and confirmed the continuing broadcast of summer music-making at Bantry House to an international audience through the European Broadcasting Union. Festival chairman, food-writer John McKenna, spoke enthusiastically of the intermingling and intimacy which make the atmosphere at the West Cork Festival unique. And festival director Francis Humphrys's introductory note summarised the growth of the event in a mere three years to one with "over 50 artists, including 20 young Irish musicians, featuring in 26 concerts and nine master-classes".

The Dublin concert, equally, was no modest undertaking. The RTE Vanbrugh Quartet joined the RTECO for a sinewy and purposefully-driven account of Elgar's Introduction and Allegro, where the occasionally excessive stridency of the orchestral violins seemed to be explained by the lightness of tone from basses and cellos.

Anthony Marwood (brother of Christopher, the Vanbrugh's cellist) sounded a mostly gentle note - no virtuoso histrionics, here - in Prokofiev's Second Violin Concerto, a deft essay in the composer's most immediately appealing bitter-sweet mode. O Duinn handled the orchestra with a sensitively matching transparency.

There were moments, it must be said, when Marwood's approach sounded just a little too plain. Yet, although she focused on narrower resources in Beethoven's Triple Concerto, Catherine Leonard's longer-arched sense of phrasing excited a tension of greater vitality. Hanno Strydom, though not as well-centred in rhythm, made light work of the demanding cello part, and Finghin Collins at the piano struck a pose of musical firmness and formality. I don't know if there's ever before been a young Irish trio who, the occasional longueurs of the finale notwithstanding, could have tackled this piece with such conspicuous success.