Reviews

Irish Times reviewers see classical guitarist Pierre Bensusan, Chamber  music in Cork and choristors at the National Gallery in Dublin.

Pierre Bensusan

Liberty Hall, Dublin

With a deferential sweep of his arm, Pierre Bensusan directs our attention to the guitar resting nonchalantly in its stand. The instrument accepts our applause demurely. As the Waltons Guitar Festival well knows, in the hands of any other virtuoso such fetishism would be frankly disturbing. For the suave and genial French-Algerian finger-stylist, however, we will overlook it.

In the previous two hours we have come to know the old lady personally, learning of its birth 26 years ago which, if Bensusan is to be trusted, makes it almost 200 in "guitar years". His frequent joshing aside, in his solo recital Bensusan clutches this guitar so tightly, burrowing his chin deep into its body, that the pair's performance resembles an intimate embrace.

From that clinch, Bensusan coaxes a soft and sensitive melange: a soothing drone from his top string; a Celtic trickle of notes that knead the senses; here the brisk pummel of a samba rhythm, now the quick rubdown of a shimmer of harmonics. It's a deep massage of music.

Working exclusively in the honey-toned tuning of Dadgad (where almost anything can sound pleasant), Bensusan employs it like a cultural compass, orienteering from the intricacy of the bagpipes, through the hard thwack of a claw-hammer banjo to the haunting Islamic accents of north Africa. Scatting playfully along to Awali, or letting Victor Hugo's poetry crease his brow with the sorrow of Tomorrow at the Dawn, Bensusan's trail-finding is at once skittish and solemn.

That dextrous balance between style and sentiment leads the wispy, slightly twee motifs of The Last Pint into a bold and fleshy union with the blues. And, in the audience sighs that slip through a phenomenal Intuite, you can hear both the contentment of fellow finger-stylists who dream of flying so high, and the soft resignation of those who never will.

Peter Crawley

Music Festival West Cork Chamber

Bantry House, Co Cork

The representation of work by living composers at the West Cork Chamber Music Festival has roughly doubled since the festival's foundation in 1996. But Thursday's programmes were a new music-free zone which concentrated exclusively on well-known names.

Not all of the music, of course, fell into the category of the everyday or familiar. English mezzo soprano Ruby Philogene, advertised to sing Berg's Seven Early Songs, performed instead a selection of five posthumously published songs that pre-date the composer's Op 1.

These are the work of a young man finding his way, testing musical routes and strategies that he would later put to very different uses.

Philogene, partnered by pianist Julius Drake, was joined by Kathryn Thomas (flute) and Hanno Strydom (cello) for the exotic clashes of Ravel's Schoenberg-influenced Chansons madécasses, which, in this performance offered the spectacle of a black singer delivering the cautionary line, "Beware of the whites", to a wholly receptive white audience. Philogene's singing was direct and true, as it was also in Brahms's Op 91, the much-loved pair of songs with viola (Hartmut Rohde).

The afternoon programme of two wind sextets (Beethoven's Op 71 and Janácek's Mládí) and an octet (Mozart's Serenade in E flat, K375) found Aisling Casey (oboe), Deirdre O'Leary (clarinet), John Ryan (horn), and Marc Trénel (bassoon) in various combinations with the members of the Galliard Ensemble. The performances were fresh and enthusiastic, but also showed an abundance of rough edges which suggested that basic issues of musical leadership had not been fully worked out in the ad hoc groupings.

There were no such problems in the Leipzig Quartet's handling of the sixth of Beethoven's Op 18 quartets. The bonhomie of the music was best captured in the Scherzo, with its recurring offbeat accents. Elsewhere the tempos seemed just a little too fast for the expressive weight the players seemed to be aiming for.

The St Petersburg Quartet hit their best form of the festival so far in Shostakovich's Fourth Quartet, which was written in 1949, in the wake of an official attack on the leading composers of the Soviet Union. The work's blatantly Jewish-flavoured Finale expresses the composer's identification with Jewish suffering, and was a gesture which meant the quartet had to be kept away from the scrutiny of public performance for a number of years. The

St Petersburg's approach was more straight than emotionally laden in the first three movements, before shifting into a level of special intensity for the finale.

The high standard was maintained in Fauré's First Piano Quartet with pianist Artur Pizarro showing true chamber music style by adjusting his dynamic levels as if he desperately wanted to ensure he could hear the contributions of his partners, Viviane Hagner (violin), Hartmut Rohde (viola) and Sonia Wieder-Atherton (cello).

Hagner and Pizarro were on the platform again for the closing item, Brahms's Horn Trio with Stephen Stirling, the playing rich, evocative and celebratory, the audience primed for the special atmosphere of the music by Stirling's informative introduction.

Michael Dervan

NCC/Holten

National Gallery, Dublin

Byrd - Mass for four voices. Iris Szeghy - The Prayer. Arvo Pärt - Magnificat-Antiphonen. Veljo Tormis - 4 Eesti hällilaulu. Julian Philips - Invocazione

So far in this summer series, the National Chamber Choir's polyphonic singing has been first-rate, but this exquisite performance of Byrd's Mass for four voices saw the Renaissance leapfrog past the contemporary to assume primary status in the programme.

This was for two reasons: the familiarity of the Byrd, a popular setting which many in the choral community will have sung; and the direction of Bo Holten. The Danish conductor and composer - long-time guest conductor of the BBC Singers and a specialist in both early and contemporary music - maintained a steady pace that in other hands might have veered towards the four-square. But Holten elucidated so much fine detail in phrasing and in attention to individual words that the 500-year-old music brimmed with freshness and colour. The only time he eased the tempo in mid-section was for the spiritually-charged conclusion of the Agnus Dei.

By and large the contemporary content required less choral virtuosity in this concert than earlier in the series. The impact of simplicity was most endearing in the folk-tinged lyricism and gently rocking ostinatos of the 1989 4 Eesti hällilaulu (4 Estonian lullabies) by Veljo Tormis, revealing Arvo Pärt's Sieben Magnificat Antiphonen - although beautifully sung - as emotionally cold in comparison.

But virtuosity - chiefly in harmonic orientation - was needed and secured in the world première of Invocazione, jointly commissioned by choir and gallery from Welsh composer Julian Philips. Like all the commissions in this series, the work's starting point is a painting in the National Gallery's permanent collection, in this case The Temple of the Sibyl, Tivoli, an Italian landscape painted in 1752 by Richard Wilson.

The texts come from a letter from Italy written by the poet Joseph Addison in 1702, and the piece is a celebration of Italy and of the old English idea of "the Grand Tour", the escape for those who "curse the cold clime and starve in northern air". Philips's seductive piece is at once serenely idyllic and busy with allusion, with Italian madrigal style figuring prominently.

Michael Dungan