West Cork Chamber Music Festivaland NCC/Putnins

West Cork Chamber Music Festival

Bantry House

The opening concert of the West Cork Chamber Music Festival offered a programme of contrasts. Schubert wrote his String Quartet in E flat when he was 16, and the piece would remain unpublished in his lifetime. Grazyna Bacewicz, Poland's leading woman composer of the mid-20th century, was over 40 when she wrote her Fourth Quartet, which won a prize at an international competition in Belgium in 1951, and was published in Liège the same year.

Little-known French composer Olivier Greif (1950-2000) wore his messages and his heart on his sleeve - his Piano Trio opens with a De Profundis movement using shock tactics that make the polystylism of Schnittke at his most extreme seem almost placid. Irish composer John Kinsella is altogether more reserved. At the time of its composition in 1977, he divulged little of the emotional turmoil behind his Third Quartet, though his note for this concert placed it in the context of the death of his first wife, Bridget, a time when "the discipline of composition helped me cope".

Munich's Rosamunde Quartet played the Schubert with a mostly quiet directness which befitted a work originally intended for domestic performance. Schubert can be much more affecting when the manner is intimate. Poland's Royal Quartet was more demonstrative in the Bacewicz, a mild-mannered work of neo-classical cast (for which, however, the composer claimed a personal implementation of serial techniques) with a giddy, almost silly finale.

Greif's Piano Trio is so over the top it's hard to know whether to laugh or cry at it. It often depends for its effects on a kind of sledgehammer subtlety, with many moments which sound as if one or other of the players has strayed in from another piece entirely. It was delivered with touches of steel and silk by Vienna's Altenberg Trio.

Cork's RTÉ Vanbrugh Quartet has lived a long time with Kinsella's Third Quartet, and it shows in the responsive nature of its playing, whether in moments of anguish, or contrapuntal defiance, or the unexpected mid-flight cut-off at the end. - MICHAEL DERVAN

NCC/Putnins

National Gallery, Dublin

Though it's chiefly thanks to Arvo Pärt that Baltic music is now indelibly on the map, his phenomenal rise to international fame has tended to overshadow the work of other composers from that part of the world. Paul Hillier's inaugural series as artistic director of the National Chamber Choir, Baltic Blues, is revealing the diversity of the emerging region's choral culture.

The third concert of the series comprised pieces by four living Balts more or less of Pärt's generation: the Latvians Peteris Vasks, Juris Karlsons and Peteris Plakidis, and the Estonian Veljo Tormis. In vital contrast to Pärt - who prefers Church Slavonic, Latin and English - all four composers were represented by vernacular settings.

Texts by the major 20th-century Latvian poets, Janis Rainis and Ojars Vacietis, were, respectively, the basis for Karlsons's colourful suite, The Unclosed Ring (1982) and Plakidis's half-hour, five-movement a cappella symphony, Destiny (1985).

Three of Tormis's Latvian Bourdon Songs were ritually strophic in the manner of Carl Orff, while Vasks's Mother Sun gave verses by Janis Peters a more rhapsodic treatment.

The unique English item was Tormis's partly sung, partly spoken and partly tolled Tower Bell in My Village (1978), in which the bucolic English of Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa was recited in a Sunday-best radio presenter's voice by tenor Warwick Harte.

Guest conductor Kaspars Putnins, who's now in his eighteenth season as director of the Latvian Radio Choir, kept a graceful and experienced hand on the tiller, allowing the singers freely to enjoy the profusion of expressive modal melody.

The more intricate textures - whose close-knit echoings both recalled the Renaissance madrigal and anticipated the refracting effects of digital delay - came off with easy-going accuracy.

Seldom is unfamiliar choral repertoire as consistently refreshing, or as pleasingly performed, as it was on this occasion. - ANDREW JOHNSTONE