Festival's finest kept until last

THE final day of the West Cork Chamber Music Festival explored some of the rarer chamber music combinations. At the larger end of the scale were an octet (Schubert's) and a string sextet (Brahms's First). At the smaller end were double bass and piano, violin and cello, and the singularity that is Schubert's Arpeggione Sonata, the one real claim to fame of the obsolete arpeggione, which is nowdays substituted for by either a viola or cello.

The festival's visiting viola player, Roberto Diaz, freely lyrical and with a nice, soft-grained tone, had Hugh Tinney as a graceful and pointed partner in the Schubert. Tinney was heard also in the Capriccio di Bravura by the great 19th-century double bassist, Giovanni Bottesini. This is music which creates an effect somewhere between a dancing bear and a circus high- wire act, and it was at least as much fun as the two put together in Duncan McTier's impressively agile and impeccably tasteful performance.

Kodaly's Duo for violin and cello was played by Anthony Maiwood and Steven Doane, with each player striking an individual stance, the violin line sharply etched with a disposition to introduce touches of gypsy flavour, the cello going for grander emotional gestures, often by way of billowy rhythm.

The team for Schubert's Octet - the Chilingirian Quartet with Romain Guyot (clarinet), Stephen Stirling (horn), Julie Price (bassoon) and Duncan McTier (double bass) - opted for an all-the-time-in-the-world approach, luxuriating in the music's easy radiance and unfailingly appealing sonorities.

This final day, however, stored up the best wine until last. The RTE Vanbrugh Quartet, joined by the viola-player and cellist of the Chilingirian Quartet (Asdis Valdimars-dottir and Philip de Groote), exulted in the rich nether glow of Brahms's utterly distinctive early Sextet in B flat. This finely-weighted reading provided a fitting conclusion to an extraordinary, eight-day feast of chamber music.

Meanwhile, the penultimate day of the festival introduced the first Young Musicians Platform. Two groups of young Irish players, coached during the week by some of the resident musicians, shared a concert to play Beethoven's String Trio in G, Op 9 No 1, and Brahms's Piano Trio in B, Op 8.

The performances had plenty of spirit, and each in its own way gave an impression of pushing against barriers. In the case of the string trio - Nicky Sweeney (violin), Cian O Duill (viola), Gerald Peregrine (cello) - this was felt most keenly in choice of tempo, especially in the daredevil response to the Presto marking of the finale.

With powerhouse playing from pianist Finghin Collins, the Brahms rather stretched credibility in a presentation that inclined too strongly towards the concerto-like (in matters of ensemble as well as volume) from the keyboard player's point of view. The sensitive partners here were violinist Catherine Leonard (whose finely-tuned musical responses would surely have fitted comfortably into any of the festival's other concerts), and cellist Hanno Strydom.

Brahms featured again in the main evening concert, when his Piano Quartet in C minor, for which the composer invoked the anguished, unrequited love of Goethe's Werther, was strongly projected by Marwood, Dfaz, Doane and Susan Tomes (piano).

Joanna MacGreggor and the Chilingirian Quartet were illuminating guides to the strange mixture of earnestness, mockery and spun-sugar to be found in Shostakovich's Piano Quintet of 1940. And MacGregor rounded the day off with an hour-long selection from Messiaen's Vingt Regards sur l'Enfant- Jesus in breathtaking performances that encompassed the raptness and intellectual steel, the tenderness and violence, the lilt and song-fulness that this most gripping of music demands.