Latvian composer Peteris Vasks's new Piano Quartet, commissioned by the West Cork Chamber Music Festival, was premiered on Saturday by James Boyd (viola), with the Florestan Trio. Like a number of Vasks's other works, the quartet begins very simply. Its initial seed or musical germ, plain and unadorned, takes root slowly and, as it flourishes, colonises extra notes from an initially small base. Along the way, climaxes are left hanging in the air, resolution being proferred by a downshift and the start of a new process.
The heart of the quartet is the cello-led, impassioned fifth movement, the earlier movements seeming like a long, mostly minimalist-patterned preamble, the closing movement a typically distancing reality check on the ecstasy which has preceded it. Boyd and the Florestans played with a commitment that was ardent, urgent and well-sustained. Two problems they couldn't mask, however, were the mis-proportioning of the protracted build-up, and the dangerous disparity of expressive weight to musical content. Vasks may know exactly what he's doing and why. But in this work the effects he creates come perilously close to a sort of musical soap-opera.
The Vasks was followed by New York resident Chinese composer Zhou Long's 1995 Poems from Tang, a string quartet in four movements, inspired by four poems from the Tang dynasty. The composer here evokes an exotically atmospheric ancient stillness by attempting, with a myriad of advanced performing techniques, a re-creation of the sound world of the Chinese zither, the ch'in. Not everything in the RT╔ Vanbrugh Quartet's performance gelled, some of the gestures remaining more fragmented than I suspect was the composer's intention within an already loose structure. But, as an introduction to the work of a composer who declares Bart≤k as his role model, it certainly whetted the appetite to hear more.
The most impressive musical offering of the day, however, came in the late-night concert. Lionel Friend conducted soprano Rosemary Harding and an ensemble of Philippe Bernold (flute), Romain Guyot (clarinet), Michel Raison (bass clarinet), Jeanne -Marie Conquer (violin), Guido Schiefen (cello) and Enrico Pace (piano) in a performances of Schoenberg's fantastical Pierrot Lunaire.
It's not so long since performances of this work used to seek out lines of angular modernity. This performance was altogether more magical, heightening the surreal imagery of Albert Giraud's poems with shapes and textures that were frequently ravishing.
Earlier in the day, Daniel Hope (violin) and Kris Bezuidenhout (piano) gave oddly imbalanced performances of the violin sonatas of Walton and Shostakovich: Hope a stylish and sensitive guide, Bezuidenhout a freer and looser player who seemed happy to place his roving imagination above rather than at the service of the composers. FaurΘ's elusive Second Piano Quintet escaped the grasp of the thoroughly fluent Keller Quartet and Enrico Pace. And the day which ended well, has also begun well, with a midday treat of English viol music from Laurence Dreyfus, Markku Luolajan-Mikkola and lutenist Thomas Boysen.
There is a treasure-trove of fine music to be explored in this area of repertoire, and the varied selection of works by Matthew Locke, Tobias Hume, Christopher Simpson and Thomas Robinson ranged persuasively from melancholy to high spirits.
