International Festival of Chamber Music

Great Hall, Queen’s University Belfast

This year’s Belfast Music Society weekend festival delivered good audiences, passionate music-making and high-calibre performers, along with platform opportunities for young people. However, the festival’s high standards underlined the paucity of chamber music provision in Belfast throughout the rest of the year.

One’s ears quickly adapted to the Great Hall’s very resonant acoustic – as did most of the performers. Three of the musicians in the Apollon Musagète Quartet play standing up, reinforcing their communication skills. Its all-Russian programme demonstrated a wide dynamic range and rhythmic vitality; Stravinsky’s Concertino leapt off the page, while a transcription of seven Prokofiev piano miniatures, Visions fugitives, revealed great subtlety and delicacy.

All these attributes came together in a moving and powerful performance of Shostakovich's Quartet No 4.

Susan Bullock, currently singing Brünnhilde for Frankfurt Opera, gave a wide-ranging song recital with pianist Malcolm Martineau. It was a revelation. The opening of Träume, the last of Wagner's Wesendonck Lieder,was just one of many magic moments of quiet intensity and lovely sound.

Martineau caught every nuance and this really was a double act, with a kaleidoscopic variety of moods and characters, from the coquettish to the blood-curdling drama of Alison Bauld’s setting of Lady Macbeth’s sleep-walking scene.

London Winds didn’t attract the huge audience support of the other recitals. In its programme, this impressively well-balanced quintet included Ligeti’s Bagatelles and Nielsen’s Quintet with tremendous panache and style, the hall’s acoustic allowing the rich sounds to blossom.

Nikolai Demidenko, a long-time favourite in Belfast, was rewarded with a sell-out audience that listened intently. He was applauded to the echo and a Chopin encore showed how refined and stylish his playing can be.

However, particularly in his three Beethoven sonatas, he seemed more intent to pursue the fastest tempos and dig deep to achieve power at the expense of quality of sound.

Piano trios by Mozart and Beethoven in Ensemble Avalon's closing concert lacked distinctiveness in this acoustic, but the second half of the concert fared much better – thanks to the clearly etched scoring of both Shostakovich's Second Piano Trioand Benedict Schlepper-Connolly's gentle Alpine meander with Keats.