A day is a long time in Irish politics at the moment, as fortunes fluctuate. And changeability has been very much a factor at the West Cork Chamber Music Festival this year.
Saturday's early evening concert offered the sort of programming for which the festival has become renowned: Alfred Schnittke's set of four Hymns from the 1970s (for combinations drawn from an ensemble of cello, double bass, bassoon, harp, harpsichord and percussion), Schumann's late Fairy Tale Pieces, for clarinet, viola and piano, and Gyorgy Kurtag's 1990 Hommage a Robert Schumann for the same combination of instruments.
Schnittke's Hymns are questing, religious works, ruminative and exploratory, by a composer who, as late as 1980, chose to be baptised into the Catholic Church. The six, mostly brief movements of the Kurtag, are much more pointed and sharply focused - Kurtag's reputation as the true inheritor of Webern's microcosmic potency is a wellearned one.
The performances (by an ensemble built around cellist Quirine Viersen in the Schnittke, by John Finucane, Tatjana Masurenko and Hugh Tinney in the Kurtag) probed right to the heart of these composers' very different worlds. Quirine Viersen appeared again, with violinist Viviane Hagner in the mid-1920s Duo by Erwin Schulhoff, a composer whose music is gaining in prominence from the attention being given to composers who flourished between the two world wars and, in particular, those who were exterminated by the Nazis.
Schulhoff was an avid follower of the fashionable trends of the inter-war years, particularly in his dallying with popular idioms. His Duo may be more derivative than original (shades of Ravel and Stravinsky), but a performance as keen as that by Hagner and Viersen - a minor miracle of co-ordinated independence - made it an edge-of-the-seat experience.
At the other end of the scale, the Bekova Trio with Tatjana Masurenko on viola made shockingly heavy weather of Brahms's Piano Quartet in A, Op. 26. The final appearance, in the late-night concert, of the Limoges Baroque Ensemble was again a mixed affair. The group's strongest member is the cellist and gamba player, Christophe Coin. But the flautist Maria-Tecla Andreotti rather lets the side down with an irritatingly tremulous vibrato and uneven tone production. Again, and in spite of balance problems, the best item in the group's programme was one which put Coin most firmly in the foreground, Bach's Sonata in D for gamba and harpsichord (Willem Jansen).
