While many classical music events may have the word ‘festival’ in their title, few carry off the festive element quite as well as the West Cork Chamber Music Festival. Now in its twenty-ninth edition, the festival attracts a loyal and well-informed audience that extends far beyond the confines of West Cork. Even on approach to Bantry, one can’t help but notice posters and flags festooned with the festival logo and it seems that every café, pub and restaurant in the town is fully behind the event. It’s perhaps this warm and homely atmosphere that draws so many world-class musicians to the town and for several years now it has remained a favourite stop on the international circuit.

The programming itself is something of a logistical marvel with a typical day featuring five or six concerts interspersed with interviews, masterclasses and workshops. To cover everything would be an impossible task and so in this review I focus on the main concerts held on days seven and eight (Thursday 4th and Friday 5th July) to give readers a taste of the festival’s offerings. 

Interpreting Vivaldi
Thursday got underway with a morning ‘Coffee Concert’ at St Brendan’s Church featuring Camerata Øresund who were performing a programme of Vivaldi concertos, mostly from the L’Estro armónico set as well as a world premiere by Sam Perkin. Referencing Stravinsky’s alleged quip that Vivaldi didn’t write five hundred concertos but rather the same concerto five hundred times, the ensemble showed great imagination in interpreting each concerto in a different way, ranging from cellist Hanna Loftsdøttir’s delightfully raspy sound in the semiquaver passagework to some beautifully judged moments of collective playing such as the sul ponticello bowing in the last movement of Concerto No. 11 or the exuberant spiccato in ‘La Folia’. 

While it was the strings that had the most fun with Vivaldi, the focus switched to the two harmonic continuo instruments – the archlute and the harpsichord – for Perkin’s piece entitled Childhood Awe. While it drew its inspiration from such seemingly incompatible sources as harpsichord finger-pedalling notation and country music fingerpicking styles, the resultant piece worked beautifully as the central item on the programme. Its gentle, melodic texture with both instruments interweaving lines – sometimes in rhythmic unison, sometimes not – produced a lovely timbral blend that evoked a tender, nostalgic innocence.                

The Camerata Øresund would have been a hard act for anyone to follow, but particularly so for a solo instrumentalist without any harmonic reinforcements. However, Dana Zemtsov proved very much equal to the task with her performance of works for solo viola at the Christian Fellowship Church that formed part of the festival’s Crespo series, which focused on some of the lesser-known areas of the chamber music repertoire. The ostensible highlight of the performance was her performance of Bach’s Chaconne from Partita No. 2 in D minor (transposed down a fifth for the viola) – a piece that will steal any show when played as well as this –  but more discerning listeners will have been equally taken by Zemtsov’s performance of Ernest Bloch’s unfinished Suite for Solo Viola whose direct lines of anguished intensity never wavered and functioned as an ideal prelude to the Bach. Also on the programme was the Irish premiere of Fazil Say’s Sonata for solo viola, a well-crafted work whose first movement made much of a recurring double-stopped motive followed by a headlong toccata-like second movement.

Dana Zemtsov (Photo © Marije van den Berg)

Chausson discovery
For the second of the day’s concerts in the Crespo series it was back to St Brendan’s for a performance of songs by Grieg, Chausson and Ravel given by soprano Anna Devin accompanied by pianist Julius Drake. The big item on the programme was Ravel’s Shéhérazade whose sensuous exoticism and undulating melodic contours were well carried off by Devin. While undeniably pleasant, the lesser-known Six Songs Op. 48 by Grieg were more lightweight and lyrical in character, but it was the haunting despair of Chausson’s ‘Le temps des Lilas’ that proved the real discovery of the concert.

The main evening concert on Thursday was shared by Ensemble MidtVest and the Chiaroscuro Quartet, each performing a quintet – the first being Kalevi Aho’s Wind Quintet No. 2 and the second Schubert String Quintet in C major. Aho’s Quintet began promisingly enough with alternating duos and trios within the ensemble sustaining long pedal tones and branching off into well-shaped melodic lines. However, the problems in the work soon became apparent. The melodies tended to wander to the point of aimlessness, the structure lacked any sense of arrival and the harmony remained stuck in a grey zone of moderate dissonance without either release or intensification. This meant a very monochrome listening experience despite Ensemble MidtVest’s excellent playing. 

The Chiaroscuro Quartet have made a name for themselves on the international concert circuit by performing staples of the classical and romantic repertoire using gut rather than the usual steel strings. Their performance of Schubert’s Quintet in C with cellist Pieter Wispelwey was excellent although it did start a little tentatively with some slight intonation issues between the two cellos. However, this was sorted on the repeat of the exposition and from this point onwards the performance was very assured with excellent pacing of the transitions between the work’s floating introspection and more impassioned moments.             

From here it was an enjoyable stroll up to the slightly rundown splendour of Bantry House for a ‘Candlelit Concert’ at 10pm featuring a performance of Ravel’s Piano Trio in A minor with Boris Giltburg on piano, Veronika Jarůšková on violin and Peter Jarůšek on cello. In what was perhaps the performance of the day, the standout feature was Giltburg’s majestic control of the piano’s tone and his seemingly effortless command of Ravel’s challenging fingerwork. The ensemble’s responsiveness to the sudden dynamic undulations and variety of texture in Ravel’s score was fully deserving of the standing ovation they received at the finish.

Boris Giltburg

Bach Partitas
The following day began with another ‘Coffee Concert’ at St Brendan’s featuring a performance of Bach’s Partitas Nos. 1 and 3 by Swiss violinist Esther Hoppe. These were both given a fantastic rendition and amidst the consistent high quality of her playing, one’s attention was drawn to the evenness of the semiquaver passagework and the flawless intonation of her double-stopping technique.     

After this, it was straight across the square – where Bantry’s renowned Friday market was in full swing – to the Christian Fellowship Church for a concert given by the Sonoro Quartet featuring two Irish premieres and Bartók’s String Quartet No. 5. The first of the premieres was Vinthya Perinpanathan’s Flight UL505 (2002), written to celebrate the arrival of the UK-based composer’s relatives from Sri Lanka. This pleasant and well-crafted piece began with sustained unison harmonics in the viola and violins before a lilting melody on the cello appeared that was subsequently passed around to the other instruments. A second, more rhythmic section, initiated by double pizzicatos on the second violin, ensued before snippets of the opening melody returned on the cello bringing this short six-minute work to a neat conclusion.

The second Irish premiere, Annelies van Parys’ Tsunami (2023), was a more texturally-focused piece inspired by the ‘otherworldy chatter of Japanese cicadas’. This certainly came across in the opening swirl of rapidly circling fragments whose uniformity was soon broken by irregular accents that gradually saturated the texture. This broke suddenly into a second section of glassy harmonic glissandi and scratch effects with an indistinct, jagged melody emerging high in the harmonic stratosphere before a final section of pressure bowing rounded out the work.

The Sonoro Quartet’s performance of Bartók’s String Quartet No. 5 was high-octane, dynamic and very engaging. The tricky rhythms and exposing unisons throughout the work were superbly executed with a sense of panache and the overall six-movement structure, which is rather complex, was given a definite sense of shape. The only thing I wondered when the group had finished a similarly blistering account of the second movement from Shostakovich’s String Quartet No. 8 as an encore was that maybe not everything needs to be played with such speed and zealous intensity (entertaining as it might be) and there are other ways of interpreting such staples of the 20th-century repertoire.

Sonoro Quartet

Instrumental alternatives
The late afternoon concert brought together the star-studded line-up of Anna Fedorova (piano), Pieter Wispelwey (cello) and Dana Zemtsov (viola) to perform two works by Schubert and Brahms in alternate instrumental versions than the ones for which they were originally written. Schubert’s Cello Sonata in A minor ‘Arpeggione’ was originally written for the now defunct arpeggione – a sort of cello with guitar tuning and frets – and it has plenty of wit and charm particularly in the catchy second subject of the first movement and the beautiful cantabile of the slow movement. The abrupt changes in character were well carried off by Fedorova and Wispelwey.

Unfortunately, such melodic inventiveness is not the hallmark of Brahms’s Trio for Piano, Cello and Clarinet and the lack of melodic inspiration makes this work sound a bit tedious at times. By replacing the clarinet, this version for viola tended to exacerbate the work’s academicism by removing the indispensable colour element despite the excellent performance it received.

Another illustrious line-up took to the stage for the main evening concert in Bantry House that evening. The concert opened with an excellent performance of Mozart’s violin sonata by Esther Hoppe accompanied by Alasdair Beatson on piano. The main item in the first half was a piano quintet by Ukrainian composer Victoria Poleva entitled Simurgh, performed by Anna Fedorova and the Dudok quartet. This began with an instantly arresting texture in which delicate, slightly dissonant string harmonics formed a backdrop to a repeated single note on piano. As it unfolded, however, the piece never got out of its comfort zone of meditating on inoffensive sonorities and took on the character of sophisticated soundtrack music.

As with the previous night, it was again the playing of Giltburg that proved the real highlight. His performance of Brahms’s Piano Quartet in G minor with members of the Pavel Haas Quartet was a masterclass in tone control – less obvious than the previous night’s Ravel – but still mesmerising.

Pieter Wispelwey (Photo: Karlis Dzjamko)

A voice to the voiceless
After two days of concerts by world-class performers, it was hard believe that there could be further wonders in store but it was the late night concert on Friday that left the biggest impression. This concert was devoted to an ongoing project by pianist Deirdre Brenner to honour the survivors of the Magdalene Laundries – an institution of the Catholic Church that incarcerated over ten thousand women and girls against their will between 1922 and 1996. It featured seven settings by Irish composers – Deirdre Gribbin, Rhona Clarke and Deirdre McKay – of five texts written by survivors as well as a poem by Jessica Traynor and a ‘Litany of Names’ listing those women who never received a proper funeral. In the text settings, the frank accounts of the injustices suffered by the women took on an operatic sense of tragedy while at the same time giving a voice to the uniqueness of each account. Each song was universally strong but two in particular stood out for me: Clarke’s setting of a text by Martina Keogh expressing the desire to move on with her life stood out for its haunting, Dido’s lament-like sense of sorrow while McKay’s setting of the ‘Litany of Names’, delivered on a single note to occasionally clangorous piano accompaniment left nobody unmoved. Both Brenner and mezzo-soprano Lotte Betts-Dean – who stood in for Fleur Barron at short notice – fully committed themselves to the performance and the presentation of the concert as a whole evoked a deep sense of reverence. As an artistic project that aimed to give a voice to the voiceless, I’m not sure I can ever recall hearing anything as powerful as this in an Irish context.

As a frequent attendee of classical music festivals, the West Cork Chamber Music Festival stood out for several reasons. On the one hand, there was the consistently high standard of performance by world-class artists and the sheer range of events. However, there was also something unique about the atmosphere of the festival that explains why so many are drawn to the West Cork town year after year. Much of this is due to the dedication and extraordinary energy of festival director Francis Humphrys who founded the festival back in 1995 and continues to lead from the front, presenting each concert himself and even writing the majority of the programme notes. However, credit must also go to his dedicated team (many of them volunteers) who were always on hand with directions, information and plenty of enthusiasm and friendliness. The fact that a festival of such quality continues to thrive in an unlikely rural location shows what can be done with imagination, will and no little amount of hard work.

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