Reviews of the West Cork Chamber Music Festivaland Byrne, RTÉ NSO/Pearceat the NCH in Dublin
West Cork Chamber Music Festival
Bantry, Co Cork
It took just a year from inspiration to first performance. The title of John Kinsella’s new work, premiered at the West Cork Chamber Music Festival on Monday, gives that much away and more.
On Hearing Purcell and Shostakovich at Bantry House– June 2008 was sparked by the Rosamunde Quartet's pairing of 20th-century quartets by Shostakovich with 17th-century fantasias for viols by England's greatest composer, Henry Purcell. And Kinsella's work comes across as a pure homage, not just to the two composers, but to the players who so insightfully paired them together.
The new quartet is cast in the form of a prelude, toccata and epilogue, dwelling first on one of Purcell's most remarkable fantasias before developing in a ruminative, obsessive manner (the material ismesmerising), and moving on to a sometimes harsh and throaty toccata. In the RTÉ Vanbrugh Quartet's performance it all communicated with the immediacy of an impromptu declaration from the heart.
There had been heart aplenty, too, on Sunday, when the Belgian Quatuor Danel performed Shostakovich’s Seventh Quartet – too much of it, in fact. The Danel’s approach, which had worked so well in their earlier performance of the Seventh Quartet by Shostakovich’s friend Mieczyslaw Weinberg, fell short in Shostakovich’s own music. The manner was too directly romantic. Shostakovich may have been more than a decade older than Weinberg, but stylistically he was much more forward-looking, a fact the Danel seemed to want to turn on its head.
There was Shostakovich playing of altogether purer cast in the concentrated, distilled ardour of Russian pianist Alexander Melnikov’s performance of the complete Preludes and Fugues, Op 87.
The 24 pieces, which the composer wrote for Tatiana Nikolayeva after hearing her at a Bach competition in 1950, were split into two tranches over Sunday and Monday, and the opening instalment was somewhat compromised by its context. It was offered following a performance of the fugue to beat all fugues, Beethoven’s Grosse Fuge, included in the RTÉ Vanbrugh Quartet’s performance of Beethoven’s String Quartet in B flat, Op 130, where Beethoven originally planned it as the finale.
The Grosse Fugetakes performers and listeners so far into the imaginative stratosphere, it's hard to see what could reasonably follow this almost unplayable exercise in extreme counterpoint.
The second instalment of the Shostakovich followed a beautifully judged, free-flowing, excitingly unsweetened account of Mendelssohn’s D minor Piano Trio (Marlene Hemmer, violin; Anne Gastinel, cello; Jeremy Menuhin; piano). And the Mendelssohn helped to set a scene in which the range of Shostakovich’s endeavour and achievement could be fully appreciated, from the sparest of preludes to the giddiest, the most reserved of fugues to the ones in which Melnikov emulated the laser-like tones of Russian brass.
Bach is going to be an ongoing feature at this year’s festival, and not just through his ghostly presence in Shostakovich’s preludes and fugues. Bach cello suites are also on the menu, and Anne Gastinel made a fine start on Sunday, playing the Third and Sixth Suites with a gutsy firmness that commanded respect.
Dutch soprano Lenneke Ruiten's contributions included a recital of French song with pianist Finghin Collins (Fauré and Duparc) and songs by Purcell (with Sarah Groser, bass viol; and Malcolm Proud, harpsichord). Her voice was as sheerly beautiful as ever, light, pliable, and clear. But she didn't seem as fully inside the music as when I've heard her in the past. It was only the most demanding passages by Purcell, passionately animated parts of If music be the food of love, which seemed to spark her into full responsiveness.
Responses, whatever their direction, were not an issue in the singing of the Norwegian group Trio Mediaeval, whose programme, A Worcester Ladymassblended 13th-century fragments from Worcester Cathedral and matching material by Gavin Bryars with alchemical ease.
Trio Mediaeval break all the rules. They make no claim to authenticity. They provided no texts or translations. But they ravished the ear and intoxicated the senses. It was a consistently winning strategy. MICHAEL DERVAN
The West Cork Chamber Music Festival continues until Sunday
Byrne, RTÉ NSO/Pearce
NCH, Dublin
Suppé– Poet and Peasant Overture.
Mozart– Piano Concerto in C K467 (exc).
Johann Strauss– The Blue Danube. Mendelssohn – Capriccio brillante.
Dvorak– Slavonic Dances.
Pianist Anthony Byrne was careful to avoid over-sentimentalising the famous slow movement from Mozart’s Piano Concerto in C (K 467). It’s a gorgeous piece burdened with a silly nickname (which I won’t mention because it derives from a 1967 Swedish film about a tightrope walker that no one I know has ever mentioned seeing), which has helped amputate the piece from the rest of the concerto and made it a staple of sentiment-rich classical compilation CDs.
On these it is often emotionally milked dry – something, thankfully, Byrne was never going to do (though I feared the worst when he appeared sporting a piano-keyboard tie). Indeed, given his steady and thoughtful playing, it was a pity the programme didn’t include the other two movements.
That said, the full concerto might not have left time for Mendelssohn's Capriccio brillante, something you rarely hear and a fitting nod to the composer's bicententary. Byrne, who teaches in Dublin's Royal Irish Academy of Music, may have tempered Mendelssohn's sparkle, but he cleanly and impressively navigated all the high-speed passages and thousands of notes.
Conductor Colman Pearce led the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra in balanced accompaniment, leaving the brillanteingredient of the Mendelssohn to the soloist.
For the rest of his programme Pearce imported the mood of his many Viennese-style New Year's Day concerts. He attained much more grace in Strauss's The Blue Danubethan curtain-raising excitement in the overture to Suppé's Poet and Peasant, which nonetheless featured the NSO brass in fine form and a well-taken elegiac cello solo. The concert came to a lively finish with two of Dvorak's colourful Slavonic Dances(Op 46, No 2 and Op 72, No 1). MICHAEL DUNGAN
