Easy on the ear, if not on the seat

The West Cork Chamber Music Festival did the unthinkable this year and moved their main venue out of Bantry House – it seems to have paid off

THE WEST Cork Chamber Music Festival is no longer the festival it once was. It began life as an event based in Bantry House. Now its main venue is St Brendan’s Church on Bantry’s Wolfe Tone Square, and events in the town outnumber those in Bantry House by a ratio of three to one. The change is remarkable, because for years the general perception was that if the festival were to move away from Bantry House it would simply die. The house, according to this view, was an even greater attraction than the music. The opposite has proven to be the case, and there was even a small increase in this year’s box-office receipts to prove it.

The shift in balance is actually a mixed blessing. On the plus side, the acoustic in St Brendan’s is more accommodating than the dry confines of Bantry House. The sound has more bloom (a better acoustic is a key factor in bringing out the best in performers) and a far higher proportion of the seats offer a reasonable acoustic experience. On the other hand, those church pews are uncomfortable enough to impinge on listeners’ concentration after quite a short sit.

Is it no accident, then, that the most memorable concerts I heard last week were both in Bantry House? Well, to be fair, there was a lot more involved than physical comfort. The Bantry festival is an event that’s full of the unlikeliest of conjunctions. This applies both to the players and the pieces. Musicians who’ve never worked together are coupled in Bantry for intensive rehearsals, often on repertoire they’ve never tackled before. And a single programme can involve as many as three or four different ensembles.

Take my two standout concerts this year. Both featured works by the German composer and clarinettist Jörg Widmann, who was also performing at the festival. Thursday brought his Fifth String Quartet ( Versuch über die Fuge). This "attempt" at a fugue functions like a compositional stream of consciousness focused on fugal endeavour (with the players sometimes flailing their bows as if banishing unsuccessful ideas), which comes complete with awkward pauses (all bravely handled by the RTÉ Vanbrugh Quartet) and sober interpolations from Ecclesiastes for soprano (a not always steady Charlotte Riedijk).

This was followed by George Enescu’s Second Piano Quartet, written in memory of Gabriel Fauré in 1944. It’s one of those pieces of Enescu’s that has a fascinating, improvisatory quality, as if the players might be musing over their material rather than delivering it exactly. The loose-limbed quality seems to be a key part of the experience. Pekka Kuusisto (violin), Hartmut Rohde (viola), Anja Lechner (cello) and Kirill Gerstein (piano) played it with a persuasive mixture of haziness and clarity.

Then came Ernest Chausson’s Concert in D for piano, violin and string quartet, music that always reminds me of a plant that’s bolted, a piece that has a claim to being the most over-the-top work of chamber music that the 19th-century produced. The pianist bears the brunt of the effort, and Angela Yoffe went that extra mile or three that most players shirk. She played her erupting, cascading part as the kind of background coruscation it needs to be – most pianists insist on being far too forward for the music’s good – and her partnership with the always seductive violin playing of Vadim Gluzman seemed perfect. The Escher Quartet provided a suitably over-heated bedrock for the two soloists.

The closing concert is always planned as something of a marathon, and Saturday's was no exception. Kuusisto played the first of Widmann's Étudesfor solo violin, another piece of music that is about the fundamentals, this time the actual act of making sound with a violin, something which Kuusisto took to with the delight of a phenomenally resourceful child.

The evening’s strangest performance was of Brahms’s E minor Cello Sonata, with Anja Lechner presenting the cello line in the most muted and drained of colours and Kirill Gerstein keeping himself in the picture like a concerto soloist, as if even the smallest of his accompanimental gestures deserved a front of stage spotlight.

Pianist Philippe Cassard joined the Danish String Quartet for the piano quintet Louis Vierne wrote at a time of multiple personal tragedies in 1918. It was composed in memory of the son he lost in the first World War, and the tone of the Bantry performance was as much one of rage as of elegy. The performance was, there is no other word for it, simply electrifying.

Responses to the Chiaroscuro Quartet’s period instruments approach to Haydn, Mozart and Schubert were very mixed, and the style, with the animated leader Alina Ibragimova leaving her colleagues in a rather too murky shade, seems to be a work in progress.

The festival's most unusual inclusion was a concert at St Finbarr's Church by the Irish Youth Choir and NYOI Camerata under Greg Beardsell of Ives ( The Unanswered Question), Barber ( Prayers of Kierkegaard), and Brahms ( Ein deutsches Requiem). The choral sound was always glorious, the orchestral playing sometimes so, but Beardsell never really managed to keep his forces in tight rhythmic alignment. That came closest in soprano Cara O'Sullivan's beautifully turned, rock-solid delivery of Ihr habt nun Traurigkeit in the Brahms.

And this year's programme by young ensembles brought a very creditable account of Mendelssohn's Quartet in E flat, Op. 12, by the Kinsella Quartet, with the playing of the leader, Emer Kinsella, showing great potential. And the DIT Brontë Quartet, led by Elina Hakanen, took the great challenges of the Third Quartet by Alexander Zemlinskyt fully in their stride.