There's a famous African drummer, Dondo Tch'il, who was greatly taken by his earliest encounters with Western art music. So much so, in fact, that he chose to spend time in Germany, studying the solid edifices of Western musical structures. Since returning to his native Nigeria, he's been applying his new discoveries to the tradition of his own musical culture.
I thought of Dondo Tch'il as I listened to Tuesday's piano and percussion Coffee Concert at the West Cork Chamber Music Festival in Bantry. In fact, I invented him then, as I thought about the way the Western appropriation of exotic African and Eastern musical techniques tends to be received in a positive light, while traffic in the opposite direction is more likely to be seen as a denaturing or corrupting influence.
Amy Rubin, her Hallelujah Games suggests, would be writing sassy, snappy music even without the influence of Ghanaian drumming. The Puerto Rican roots displayed in William Ortiz's Graffiti Noyorican sound more persuasive than the art-music overlay.
Also in the programme offered by pianist Joanna MacGregor and percussionist Hans-Kristian Sorensen were Judith Shatin's 1492, a work to tease and assault the senses, and the playfully cooler interplay of piano and marimba in Georges Aperghis' Quatre pieces febriles. It was, however, a short solo excerpt from Aperghis's Conversations, a tiny snippet of music theatre, that, momentarily, lifted this concert onto its highest plane.
Aleksandar Madzar's 5 p.m. traversal of the complete piano studies of Debussy was workmanlike but dull, his handling of Mikhail Pletnev's Tchaikovsky arrangements from The Nutcracker honourable but redundant.
The Panocha Quartet presented Bartok's Sixth Quartet with honeyed gentility, as if they were afraid to probe too deeply into a work where each of the four movements bears the marking, Mesto (Sad). The RTE Vanbrugh Quartet engaged more fully with late Beethoven in the Quartet in E flat, Op. 127, sometimes forcing for more than they could manage to draw from the music, but finding the right mode for the slow movement.
Soprano Sophie Kallhammer (replacing the advertised Juanita Lascarro) was a disappointment in the latenight recital of Duparc songs. It wasn't so much her voice (thin, although even across the range) but the sheer lack of responsiveness which was bothering. And, with Stefan Irmer's piano-playing sounding generally over-expressed, the inner mystery of these songs was simply never breathed into being.
