Opening in style at Bantry

Serenade in C minor, K388 - Mozart

Arcadiana - Thomas Ades

Death and the Maiden Quartet -

It always seems like something of a luxury, the way the West Cork Chamber Music Festival sets about planning a concert.

Just look at the programme which opened the 1999 event last night: a wind octet followed by two string quartets, and a different group of performers for each. What's behind it all, of course, is not the pursuit of luxury, but rather a sense of idealism, that in the best of all possible worlds this sort of programming should be possible, and that, in Bantry, it will be.

Festival director Francis Humphrys's programme note on the Mozart serenade was directed at those "who take lascivious pleasure in Mozart's writing for wind instruments". It's a well-aimed phrase, for the pleasure to be had from Mozart's works for wind ensemble is an unaccountable one, and I succumbed to its textural delights on first acquaintance in my late teens.

The Octuor Paris-Bastille are an elegant and musically-refined group (sometimes too refined to grant Mozart's rests their full measure of silence), whose touch is light and whose dynamic shading in the potentially claustrophobic acoustic of Bantry House was a miracle of sensitivity.

Thomas Ades, now in his late twenties, has become the most feted British composer of the Nineties. It seems almost de rigueur to have a clear position on him as either the greatest musical genius Britain has produced since Britten, or else as someone being acclaimed beyond his achievement.

Arcadiana for string quartet, played with typical persuasiveness by the Arditti Quartet, shows a fondness for allusion (both musical and extra-musical) expressed with clear gesture and decided instrumental mastery. It certainly engages the attention. But I don't know that it explains what all the fuss is about (unless it's the fact that he was 23 when he wrote it).

The RTE Vanbrugh Quartet recently confirmed Keith Pascoe as their new second violinist, replacing Elizabeth Charleson. There's definitely been a change of playing style with the change of personnel. The players still like a heavy fortissimo (given lots of exposure in Schubert's Death and the Maiden Quartet), but the norm is actually now less pressured. The old weightiness of utterance is fading slightly in the face of a developed sense of line, most notably in the playing of the leader, Gregory Ellis.

Pascoe doesn't yet come across with the strength of personality of Charleson, and there was still a feeling of style in transition in the Schubert. Still, the change seemed to me to be all to the good.