THERE aren't many concerts which throw in a sunset over Bantry Bay with the price of the ticket, but the West Cork Chamber Music Festival has managed to match its setting with its programme for a taxing, week long series of events all, with one exception, taking place in Bantry House and ending next Saturday night.
The exception is the Fin de Siecle concert, which will be given next Wednesday at Holy Trinity Church in Schull. It has to be admitted that Schull and classical music do not strike an immediate sense of harmony. Mention yachts, now, or draft a scenario in which suburban Cork, en masse, takes wing to the coast, and a more appropriate picture of Schull in summertime arises. Fin de siecle indeed the tanned mellow masses which throng the town's few streets sometimes have an end of era aura. The suspicion" is that this cannot continue, this lotus eating existence, this, lounging, lingering, conversational, salty grouping and regrouping while free range children shake themselves like dogs as they leave the waters of the bay when, at last, the shades of evening fall.
Revolutionary Note
The mistake is to imagine - if the revolutionary note is to be maintained - that this is the aristocracy at play. No. The no ability is otherwise engaged, - mostly just a cove or two away in Baltimore or Castletownshend. The artists on the other hand cluster at Ballydehob or even Castletownbeare. But Schull, Barleycove and Goleen show Cork's middle classes at full tilt of enjoyment and self satisfaction. Bigger, better motor boats hammer through the waters to Bere Island and Cape Clear; huge but perfectly produced meals are consumed in any of a vast array of good coastal restaurants. The drinking, like the talk, continues night, noon and morning, and honest to God a terrific time is had by just about everyone, including au pairs.
Anyhow, an ideal corrective to, this self indulgence comes with the appearance of Madrigal 75 and the Vanburgh String Quartet and Cara O Sullivan, Andreja Malir, William Dowdall and Richard O Donnell at Holy Trinity, the programme goes from age to age, from the last years of the 16th, century to Cork composer Patrick Zuk for this one, with Charpentier, Haydn, Parry and Elgar on the way.
Gala Concert
The West Cork Chamber Music Festival opened with last night's gala concert in Bantry House and offers a mouth watering schedule even for palates sated with the lobsters oysters and farm cheeses commonplace in this part of the country. If Bantry House and the West Cork Chamber Music Festival ever decide to go to, Glyndebourne the picnics for the punters could be composed like a Dutch still life - fruit, flowers and feathers - from the shelves of Manning's Emporium at Ballylickey. Bantry is the gateway to the wilds of West Cork and it is in those mountainy pastures beyond the bay that goats munch the heather which flavours their cheeses, it is in those inlets that the crab and the mussels congregate before being captured for the smokery and the emporium. When the marquee rises over Ballylickey and the crowds throng round the Manning's sign for the July Food Fair, the atmosphere seems to celebrate the natural bounty of the land scape. Natural, but not unsophisticated. Many of these items are produced by highly skilled practitioners, whose affection for traditional or organic methods does not blind them to the imperatives of the market place.
Quality, in food as in music, is all. At the heart of the West Cork Chamber Music Festival, for example, is the RTE Vanburgh, String Quartet, artists in residence at UCC and at Waterford Regional Technical College. Incidentally, these people write a mean brochure: Taverner's Hidden Treasure is described as a meditation on Paradise with explosive intrusions from the world of passion.
The Quartet features throughout the programme, which began on the appropriate French note (L'Imaginaire Francaise is the title) with Debussy, Verlaine and Franck. Yes, Verlaine was a poet but that's, the point about this festival, it has lots of poets. On Tuesday, Seamus Heaney will read his Squarings within the structure of perfornance of Bach's Sixth Cello Suite by Robert Cohen; on Thursday, Michael Hartnett will read Mountains Falls on Us between movements of Haydn's suite The Seven Last Words played by the Parisii Quartet. Veronique Dietschy will sing Yeats, while Verlaine gets two outings, once with Debussy (Ariettes oubliees) and again with Faure (La Bonnet Chanson).
Candle lit Concerts
Even reading about it is exhausting four 50 minute afternoon recitals three late night performances, candle lit concerts as dusk fills the old garden. Tonight there is a new work by Jane O'Leary; old work by Bartok and Schubert,"
Messiaen and Ravel, Franckand Robert Simpson, Mozart and Brahms. The musicians include Barry Douglas, Philippe, Cassard and Anthony Marwood.
It must be remembered that this is fairly old hat to the people of West Cork. The West Cork Music programme (patron: Sir David Puttnam) carries right on to December and includes such events as the Mussel Fair concert and the August series in Castletownshend.
West Cork does nothing by halves or even three quarters, and anyone wanting to take a breather during the Chamber Music Festival will be encouraged towards the Master Classes, which will be given in public. And then there's the French connection in the form of an art exhibition which features five pieces from each of eight contemporary Irish artists who have worked in France these, include Louis Le Broquy, William Crozier and Anne Madden.
The French connection is important; the stable yard at Bantry House is now devoted to The Armada Experience and the story of the French in Bantry Bay, which is an ironic collusion, given that the First Earl of Bantry was raised to the peerage as a reward for organising the local defences when the French ships arrived in the bay in 1796. It was the Second Earl, however, who made the house the marvel it still is despite some hint of faded glories, the concerts take lace in the library where the high windows look out on that long long flight of urn flanked, steps. This is the month the wisteria flourishes on the pergola, the month of unending evenings, of twilights extinguished only by the dawn. Dawn on the Caha mountains . . .
Oh, yes, the concerts: booking and general queries to the WCCMF at The Gallery, Main Street, Ballydehob, Co Cork.