Matching the accent to the style

Review: Michael Dervan reviews the West Cork Chamber Music Festival which took place at Bantry House in Co Cork.

The Leipzig String Quartet, making its West Cork Chamber Music Festival début, was the busiest ensemble during Tuesday's concerts.

Its handling of Mozart's Dissonance quartet in its opening programme showed it to be a rhythmically crisp ensemble. It has clearly absorbed much from the experiences of period-instrument practitioners in terms of tone and vibrato. And although their Mozart was darker in colour and heavier in texture than you would expect from actual period players, one got the feeling that their engagement with 18th-century music was fresh and direct.

They also offered Mendelssohn's late Quartet in F minor, Op 80, which has been described as the most intensely tragic work Mendelssohn ever wrote. In spite of their best efforts it has to be admitted that tragedy, however personally felt, was not Mendelssohn's true métier. Had it been, the tossing and turning of this quartet would not so frequently seem to amount to bluster, and the work would surely have won a higher place in listeners' affections.

Dvorák's String Quintet in E flat, Op 97, for which the quartet were joined by the viola player Hartmut Rohde, would surely have a higher profile if the composer had not explored similar terrain with even greater success in his New World symphony and his American string quartet. Tuesday's performance of this often infectiously high-spirited music was a delight, with the quartet members adding to the impression that finding the right idiom and accent for a wide range of styles is something they make a speciality of.

The Russian duo of Fyodor Kuznetsov (bass) and Yuri Serov (piano) offered more Shostakovich songs; the arresting Suite On Verses Of Michelangelo Buonarroti, written at the end of the composer's life, was conveyed in such startling black and white that it at times brought to mind the even more violent and starkly polarised work of one of Shostakovich's favourite pupils, Galina Ustvolskaya.

The second of this year's festival commissions, Impromptus, by the Azerbaijani composer Franghis Ali-Zadeh, was premièred by the Altenburg Trio. The three impromptus are separated by string cadenzas and framed by a sharply rhythmic prelude and postlude for prepared piano, with the extremities of the keyboard transformed to yield sounds of pure percussion.

The two cadenzas, one rather monotonous, the other rather too prolix, proved a stumbling block on first hearing in a work that seemed awkward to pace persuasively.

Also in the day's offerings was an over-sweetened account of Borodin's already sweet Second String Quartet, from the St Petersburg Quartet, and a violin and piano recital from Viviane Hagner, a violinist capable of machine-like perfection, and Finghin Collins.

Hagner was particularly impressive in the little-known Solo Sonata by the Hungarian composer Sándor Veress. The nuancing of Post Scriptum by the Ukrainian composer Valentin Silvestrov didn't quite come off, with Collins mistaking the composer's evocations of classical style for statements of the actual style itself.

But Schumann's Second Violin Sonata found both players on firmer ground, especially in the grittily impassioned finale.