A live-concert resurrection to lift us out of musical limbo

Musically, we're in a kind of limbo. The country's biggest musical institution, the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra, still hasn't found a way to play regularly for live audiences, though it is performing for a paying public at the Bord Gáis Energy Theatre this Friday – a giant leap, in current circumstances. And, who knows, the definitive move of the orchestra from RTÉ to the National Concert Hall, currently scheduled for Monday November 1st, may change all that, though currently classical music is pretty sparse in the hall's own schedule. At the moment it looks as if it's regional promoters who are being quickest to get back to normal activity. The Westport Festival of Chamber Music took place earlier this month, Music for Galway has announced its 40th season with concerts running up to January, the tiny Derravaragh Music Association, which gives concerts in Tullynally Castle, Co Westmeath, is back in action, and last weekend brought full programmes from the Sligo Festival of Baroque Music and the New Ross Piano Festival.

New Ross opened with a confident free midday recital by Tiffany Qiu, who is currently continuing her studies at the Royal Academy of Music in London. Her programme of Bach, Chopin, Schubert, Debussy, Elliot Teo (a fellow student in London) and Liszt followed the simplest and most straightforward of lines: a succession of pieces that she particularly likes. On this occasion it was the clean lines of three movements from Bach’s fifth French Suite which most fully suggested her potential.

The main opening concert started with an extravaganza, the arrangement of Brahms’s Academic Festival Overture for four players on two pianos made by Robert Keller, chief editor at Brahms’s publisher, Simrock. It was a peculiar choice, given the composer’s reservations about Keller’s transcriptions, and it sounded exactly like what it was – a version for domestic consumption, prepared at a time when music lovers had no access to radio or recordings. Keller himself likened his arrangements to “drawings”. Brahms’s musical thought came awkwardly in and out of focus in the performance by Katya Apekisheva, Christian Chamorel, Finghin Collins and Charles Owen.

Overly sculpted

Apekisheva and Owen are an established duo, and performed together in works by Poulenc and Milhaud, and also in solos, Owen offering overly sculpted performances of Chopin (the Nocturne in F sharp, Op 15 No 2, and the Barcarolle) and Apekisheva a hell-for-leather, aggressive account of Prokofiev’s sharp-edged Sarcasms.

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The festival’s major new commission was Sally Beamish’s Sonnets for three pianists and two pianos. Six hands is a rare enough combination, but Beamish took the idea quite a bit further in a theatrical piece sparked by Shakespeare’s Sonnets 19 and 129.

Sonnets is a playful piece that casts the players as the Bard himself (Owen), the dark lady (Apekisheva) and the young man who was of interest to both (Collins). It’s also a theatrical piece for which the first entry set the tone – Collins sauntering up the aisle of St Mary’s Church, more interested in flicking through pages on his mobile phone than anything in the wider world.

Beamish makes atmospheric use of some songs of Dowland and plays quite directly with the interpersonal tensions she’s depicting. The theatrical realisation, however, did get a bit too guffaw pantomimic, as in the moment when the three players were jostling for position on a single piano stool.

Israeli pianist Einav Yarden made a point of juxtaposing Haydn and CPE Bach, the one a giant in so many areas of music, the other a famous son whose quirkiness continues to make him elusive to many listeners. Yarden’s approach to both composers was very brittle, melodic lines shard-like, the stretched logic of CPE Bach pushed beyond breaking point. It was almost as if she had taken the performing aesthetic of postwar serial music and applied it to the late 18th century. She shone, however, in Hungarian composer Péter Eötvös’s Erdenklavier-Himmelklavier, a 21st-century tribute to fellow composer Luciano Berio, and even more so in Eötvös’s Dances of the Brush-Footed Butterfly. In Christian Chamorel’s solo recital it was also the most recent work, Heinz Holliger’s Elis, a set of three “night-pieces” from the early 1960s, that brought the best playing.

Pedal piano

The highlights of the festival came from Cédric Pescia and Philippe Cassard. They played Debussy’s two-piano arrangement of Schumann’s Op 56 Studies for the pedal piano, a long-obsolete instrument that emulated the organ by giving the piano a pedal board. These studies are now most often heard in organ recitals, where some of the pieces take on a kind of fairground music feel. It was good to hear them in more sensitive and shapely accounts that more accurately reflect their true nature.

And it was Pescia and Cassard who brought the festival to a blazing close, in Liszt’s two-piano arrangement of Beethoven’s Choral Symphony. Brahms was particularly severe in his view on Keller’s two-handed arrangements, saying, “I would have considered a two-hand arrangement interesting only if an extraordinary virtuoso did it. Somewhat like how Liszt did the Beethoven symphonies.” And Liszt’s four-handed arrangements work even harder than his two-handed ones to deliver the musical essence of those works.

Pescia and Cassard have already recorded the two-piano Beethoven Choral Symphony, in Berlin last year, on a pair of Bechstein concert grands. The clarity of the recording studio was not delivered on Steinways in New Ross, but the spirit of the music was just as well served in a reading where the shape and grandeur of the music – and, of course, some glorious and not so glorious moments of pianistic clamour – brought the audience leaping to their feet.