Michael Dervan at the West Cork Chamber Music Festival, and John Lane at Brendan Benson in Whelans.
West Cork Chamber Music Festival
Bantry, Co Cork
By Michael Dervan
The grand finale of the West Cork Chamber Music Festival often stretches to some sort of rare extravagance. This year it was a performance by the combined RTÉ Vanbrugh and Silesian String Quartets of the Octet written by George Enescu in 1900 when the composer was not yet out of his teens.
Enescu is now remembered chiefly as the composer of a colourfully folksy Romanian Rhapsody. In truth, he was a multi-faceted musician, performing and recording as violinist, pianist and conductor, as well as working for the cause of music in his native Romania.
He was also the teacher of Yehudi Menuhin, who called him "the greatest musician I've known".
Pablo Casals, who also knew him well, described him as "the greatest musical phenomenon since Mozart".
Enescu had one of the most remarkable musical memories, and Menuhin recalled him playing the violin part of the Ravel Violin Sonata from memory after a single run-through.
The early Octet is ambitiously conceived as a four-movement work that also functions in toto as an extended sonata-form movement.
This, of course, is not the sort of conceit that exercises concert-goers a great deal. They are far more likely to notice the work's melodic prolixity, its remarkable long-flowing lines that interact in a manner that comes to sound less contrapuntal than heterophonic.
The music has at once a Brahmsian thrust and expressiveness, and a more haunted impressionist undergrowth, where things move with a busy suggestiveness that both attracts and curiously eludes the ear.
This simultaneous evocation of the specific and the hazy is a characteristic that provides a large part of the fascination of this and other works of Enescu's.
Sunday's performance had the air of a special occasion, communicating exuberance, indulgence and a special soulfulness at all levels in the complex textures.
The two string quartets played out of their skins, with the contributions of Gregory Ellis (violin) and Simon Aspell (viola) coming across with recurring evocative power.
The closing programme also included Mozart's G minor Piano Quartet (Zoltán Gál, viola, with the Osiris Trio) in a strongly-projected performance that seemed often more than a shade too strident. And Ian Wilson's new nine hours of moonlight, a festival commission setting poems by Tony Curtis for soprano (Charlotte Riedijk), bass flute (Nancy Ruffer), violin (Patricia Kopatchinskaja) and harp (Godelieve Schrama), seemed like a reversion to an earlier manner in the composer's output, full of atmospherics and word-painting. Strangely, the instrumental writing was more persuasive than the contours of the securely sung vocal line.
Sunday is also traditionally a festival platform for the young ensembles who have attended the week-long series of master classes that are integral to the daily diet in Bantry House. The Quatuor Vinteuil from France showed high professionalism in Schubert and Brahms, but the overplaying of their leader seriously limited their appeal. The Eblana String Quartet had an altogether more engaging manner, especially in the slower sections of Beethoven's Quartet in E flat, Op. 74; they were less finely regulated, however, in passages of faster argument.
The Elysium Piano Trio offered Dvorák's tuneful Dumky Trio in a performance where the strengths of cellist and pianist were not matched by the violinist. But the palm this year had to go to the Iverna String Quartet, who offered Britten's Second Quartet in a characterful, always absorbing reading.
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Brendan Benson
Whelan's, Dublin
By John Lane
Detroit-based pop/folk/rock singer-songwriter Brendan Benson knows how to adapt and survive.
He's been through the mill
of the music business over the past half-dozen years but came up musical trumps in 2002 with his album Lapalco.
And onstage on Monday night without his backing band, the Wellfed Boys, Benson revelled in the challenge of being in unfamiliar territory and delivered a set with equal parts gusto and nervousness.
This stripped-down sound - consisting of Benson on guitar and vocals, and bandmate Chris Plum on '70s Moog keyboard, tambourine and
backing vocals - made Benson's set an unfettered, almost freewheeling
affair.
Minus the energy and safety-zone afforded by an accompanying rhythm section, a slightly edgy Benson delivered his songs in a way that heightened the gentle drama of the quieter numbers and gave an incendiary edge to the rockier ones.
Though the immediacy of his approach brought to mind contemporaries such as White Stripes and Ryan Adams, Benson seems incapable of wearing his influences as gaudily on his sleeve, and avoids the tedious sense of pastiche evoked by many like-minded acts.
What sets him apart, however, is the quality of his song-writing.
His rock-pop sound is reminiscent of . . . well, take your pick, the entire history of rock and pop music seems to be in there, from AC-DC to Bowie, XTC to Zeppelin.
And in his lyrics, he offers a whimsical world view that manages to find the universal in the personal.
The fact that Benson wrote and performed almost every note on his 2002 album Lapalco - from which the bulk of the night's set came - lends
even his most beefed-up and cheesy rock 'n' roll tracks an intimacy and assures he is always in full command of his performance.
Lapalco is Benson's second album. His first, 1996's One Mississippi, was a cult hit and was apparently praised by everyone who heard it - except his label bosses at Virgin Records, who dropped him.
On the evidence of this show, it won't be long before they're kicking themselves hard.
