Irish Chamber Music Society Festival

Freemasons Hall, Dublin

The Irish Chamber Music Society (ICMS) is the brainchild of viola-player Lisa Dowdall. It’s an idealistic venture, intended to be “a free artistic outlet for Irish artists giving the power to musicians to play their favourite works chosen on artistic merit”. The society says its members are “a community of Ireland’s finest musicians working together through chamber music to create a space for flexible artistic collaboration”.

I got to three concerts in the ICMS’s inaugural four-day festival, at the Freemasons’ Hall in Molesworth Street, one of early music, one of French music, and a blue-chip combination of string quartets by Haydn and Schumann followed by Mendelssohn’s miraculous, youthful Octet.

The Octet was given a consistently high-octane performance by the combined Schumann and Callino Quartets, with the Schumann’s leader, Mia Cooper, taking forcefulness as her response to the composer’s unusual exhortation for an orchestral style of playing in this piece. The result was at times a little too wild for comfort, but the overall effect was enjoyably robust.

The Schumann Quartet’s performance of a quartet by Schumann – in A minor, Op. 41 No. 1 – was better disciplined, and communicated with a kind of plain-speaking directness. The Callino Quartet’s approach to Haydn’s

Lark

Quartet was light in tone, fluid and flexible in manner, and deftly stylish to boot.

The early music programme opened with a selection of pieces for flute (William Dowdall) and harpsichord (David Adams) by Thomas Roseingrave and Francesco Geminiani, two 18th-century composers who worked in Dublin. And their choices made sure that a distinctive Irish flavour was part of the mix.

Trio Quattro (Anita Vedres, violin, Malachy Robinson, violone, and David Adams, harpsichord) offered a florid excerpt from Biber’s First Rosary Sonata, a toe-tapping account of a chaconne by Nicola Matteis, and a lavishly embellished performance of Corelli’s Third Violin Sonata.

Cora Venus Lunny (violin), Lisa Dowdall (viola) and Kate Ellis (cello) took the idea of contrapuntal independence to extremes in Bruno Giuranna’s arrangement of Bach’s Goldberg Variations. The dominance of Lunny’s sometimes too hard-edged delivery created the feeling of solo and accompaniment, and the same strange effect was also found in Lunny and Ellis’s handling of Ravel’s Sonata for violin and cello.

The rest of the French programme – Debussy’s Sonata for flute, viola and harp (William and Lisa Dowdall with Aisling Ennis on harp) and Ravel’s Introduction and Allegro for harp, string quartet, flute and clarinet (with Andreja Malir on harp, the Dublin String Quartet, William Dowdall, and Paul Roe, clarinet) – was done with warm-hearted grace.