Music in Drumcliffe

St Columba’s Church, Co Sligo

What do you get if you bring together a saxophonist, a horn-player, a trombonist, a singer, two pianists and a string quartet? You get the rather unusual line-up for the three days of this year’s Music in Drumcliffe festival.

The result was even more unusual than you might have expected. The New York-resident Swiss saxophonist, Daniel Schnyder, is also a composer who straddles the worlds of classical music and jazz, and his music was heard in a number of concerts, as well as being the subject of a late-night portrait concert.

The German singer Salome Kammer is not just a singer but an actress, too, and as well as songs intended for singing actresses by Kurt Weill, she included Luciano Berio's Sequenza III(intended for a singer who could act) and some sound poems by German Dadaist Hugo Ball (intended, presumably, for anyone courageous enough to take them on).

Schnyder and Kammer are both performers who warm up their audiences with a bit of banter – Schnyder even allowed himself a joke about the age of the audience, by gauging the kind of jazz saxophonist they might be most familiar with.

His own work fell into two distinct strands. There were arrangements of works by great names (Vivaldi, Handel), presented in unusual, saxophone-led colouring, with a sometimes honking and screaming delivery, but, underneath it all, mostly pretty faithful to the original material. And there were his own compositions, slightly jazzily neo-classical with wrong-note spicing, and room for the spectacularly limber, gusty and gutsy playing that is clearly Schnyder’s speciality as a performer.

It seemed a pity that Kammer’s Weill had to be heard in arrangements with string quartet by Steffen Schleiermacher.

The trademark of Weill’s work in the 1920s and 1930s was his absorption of popular idioms – he actually managed the rare feat of becoming a classic in both popular and classical worlds. The intrusive artiness of Schleiermacher’s arrangements totally undermined the character of Weill’s musical achievement.

Kammer's performances of poems from Ball's 1916 Laut- und Klanggedichtewere quite simply a tour-de-force. She didn't just make stanzas like "elomen elomen lefitalominal/wolminuscalo/baumbala bunga/acycam glastula feirofim flinsi" sound persuasive, she actually made them sound riveting. As she said to the audience after she had introduced the poems, "Anyway, you will understand it." And she was right.

She was equally engrossing in Hildegard von Bingen's Quam pretiosa and in the inversion of normal singing and concert behaviour that is Sequenza III.

The festival’s resident ensemble, the Vogler String Quartet, were heard in fine, virile form in youthful Mendelssohn and in an iconoclastic set of pieces from the mid-1920s by Erwin Schulhoff, including a Viennese waltz obstinately written with four beats in a bar.

Dublin-resident Russian pianist Elisaveta Blumina offered a selection of pieces by Ukrainian Valentin Silvestrov, including a recent Waltz dedicated to her. The playing seemed too specific for music that makes a point of blurring its edges, and she was in altogether finer form in a selection from the anything but childish Children's Piecesthat Mieczyslaw Weinberg wrote in the 1940s.

Swiss horn player Bruno Schneider (heard in Mozart, Beethoven and Schumann, as well as a rake of Schnyder pieces) didn't seem to be having good days in the classics. But German trombonist Henning Wiegräbe provided one of the festival highlights in his performance of Swedish composer Folke Rabe's Basta, a virtuoso showpiece which transcends the trombone's monodic limitation by having the performer sing and play at the same time.