From great country house to city club, music festival marches on

The ever-evolving Music in Great Irish Houses festival saw performances this year in locations that were never even houses, a diversity reflected in the concerts themselves, writes MICHAEL DERVAN

THE KBC Music in Great Irish Houses festival has changed a lot since it gave its first concert at Castletown House in Kildare in June 1970. Then, it was known as the Festival in Great Irish Houses, it was an out-of-Dublin event, and it presented orchestral concerts as well as the chamber music that is its current focus.

In the intervening years the festival has played in houses the length and breadth of the land. It’s been to Stormont in Belfast and Hillsborough Castle in Co Down, to Dublin Castle and the former House of Lords (now part of the Bank of Ireland) in Dublin, to houses that are museums and others that are still family homes. This year’s selection reflected a growing focus on places that never were houses in the first place – the Sugar Club, the National Gallery and the RDS Concert Hall.

The opening and closing concerts were both held in the Long Gallery at Castletown and offered the intriguing prospect of hearing leading French string quartets, Quatuor Ebène at the beginning, and Quatuor Ysaÿe (their one-time tutors) at the end.

For me, the laurels were all with the Ebènes.

The Ysaÿes delivered Haydn, Brahms and Schumann with all the pleasures and frustrations of what might be called an old-school style of playing. It’s the kind of style where the actual music seems to take second place to the gorgeous tonal homogeneity of the group on the one hand, and a self-glorifying individuality of expression on the other. The effect on Saturday was almost as if the three pieces represented a single composer at different periods in his or her life.

By comparison, the Ebènes were at times almost puppyish in the variety of response they brought to Mozart, Bartók and Debussy. Mozart’s Divertimento in F, K138, was energised with a force that at times seemed almost overwhelming. Bartók’s First Quartet, dating from 1909, was played with all the wisdom of 21st-century hindsight. And Debussy’s early Quartet was presented with a quasi-orchestral richness and variety of colouring.

Energy, in fact, was the hallmark of many of the concerts I attended. The German players of the Fauré Quartett, performing in the Victorian orangery at Killruddery House, decided that the sole surviving piano quartet movement from Mahler’s student years should be pumped up in a heavy, heart-wrenching manner that the music could hardly bear. They brought the same kind of overwrought, in-your-face manner to piano quartets by Schumann and Brahms.

The RDS Concert Hall was the venue for a programme of two-piano music by the Irish duo of Finghin Collins and Hugh Tinney, both experienced players, but first-timers in this pairing as a duo. The two piano repertoire is a particularly difficult one for performers. It’s very easy for two pianists to generate too much sound, and very difficult for them to avoid the ricochet effects that are created when the ensemble is not impeccably tight. In other words, the collective endeavour can sound a lot less subtle than the quality of the individual contributions might suggest.

Collins and Tinney (who changed sides between first and second pianos during the evening) didn't quite capture the atmosphere of Debussy's elusive, war-inspired En blanc et noir, or find the necessary variety of texture in Rachmaninov's Second Suite. They were at their best in the brio of Milhaud's Scaramoucheand the giddy high spirits of Shostakovich's Concertino.

The festival does, of course, still visit houses on a much smaller scale. And small scale is one of the attractions – and potential liabilities – at Beaulieu House outside Drogheda and Emo Court outside Portlaoise. Latvian violinist Baiba Skride and German cellist Jan Vogler both played solo Bach at Beaulieu, and joined forces for Halvorsen and Ravel. The duos didn’t quite gel, and Vogler seemed off-form in Bach’s C major Cello Suite. But Skride was like a force of nature in the great D minor Partita, a force that audiences don’t often get to experience in such vivid close-up.

The delicacy of manner shown by the beautifully light-voiced tenor Robin Tritschler in Brahms's In Waldeinsamkeitwas of a quietness that would probably be dangerous to essay in normal concert surroundings. Later on, his pianist Simon Lepper did at times seem to have difficulty controlling the small grand piano he was provided with. But the duo was on top form in Britten's Winter Words, a cycle in which the composer's imaginative pictorial responses to Thomas Hardy's poems make word and music seem inseparable – or at least that's how Tritschler and Lepper conveyed them.