This year's West Cork Chamber Music Festival is the biggest yet, with over 50 artists scheduled to perform in 26 concerts between Sunday, June 28th and Sunday, July 5th, writes Michael Dervan. The festival's backbone as ever is the RTE Vanbrugh String Quartet, which this year will perform works by Beethoven, Haydn, Gyorgy Kurtag, Raymond Deane, Alfred Schnittke, Robert Simpson and Dvorak. The Borodin String Quartet will concentrate on Russian repertoire. Canadian pianist MarcAndre Hamelin will be heard in music that, for him, is unusually mainstream (Haydn, Schubert, Mozart, Prokofiev, Dvorak, Brahms, Faure), though he will also be heard in late-night cabaret with his wife, Jody Applebaum. Joanna MacGregor will play Bach's Art of Fugue and other visiting performers include Hugh Tinney, Alison Browner, Ida Levin, Anne Gastinel, Juanita Lascarro, the Leopold String Trio, and a string of young Irish musicians who will be heard in a new lunchtime slot at Vickery's Hotel. At the centre of the festival is its biggest undertaking yet, when Lionel Friend conducts Mahler's Lied von der Erde in a chamber version by Schoenberg, with Alison Browner and Ludwig van Gijsegem as soloists. With 13 instrumentalists involved, the festival is abandoning Bantry House for this one event and relocating to the larger space of the Church of Ireland. Booking, says festival director, Francis Humphrys, has been very brisk, with tickets for a number of the main evening events already in short supply.

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