West Cork Chamber Music Festival: women’s work and a remarkable Beethoven

The West Cork Chamber Music Festival opened with a work that represents one of the important musical trends of our time, a historically unprecedented focus on work from across the centuries composed by women. And one of the festival’s main strands was a series of pieces presenting what festival director Francis Humphrys called “famous women in their own words”, though mostly in works composed by men.

Fifty years ago there was not a single work by Polish composer and violinist Grazyna Bacewicz (1909-69) listed in the classical catalogue published by Gramophone magazine. Today, if you search on Apple’s new Classical app, you can select from 82 works by her, with no fewer than six different recordings of her 1945 First Violin Sonata, subtitled Sonata da camera.

The Bantry performance of this attractive work, in a style that falls somewhere between neo-baroque and Fritz Kreisler-ish pastiche, was given in seductive tones by Cork violinist Mairéad Hickey, with French pianist Jérémie Moreau a rather strait-laced partner. This duo’s best offering came in the pure romanticism of Grieg’s Second Violin Sonata.

Russian violinist Alina Ibragimova, a festival favourite, was disappointing this year, and neither she nor the pianist Cédric Tiberghien seemed to penetrate to the core of the late works by Schumann they explored, until they were joined by the German cellist Leonard Elschenbroich, who helped generate the necessary radiance and warmth in the composer’s Piano Trio in G minor.

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Another cellist, Claudio Bohórquez (German-born but of Peruvian-Uruguayan descent) shone in Rachmaninov’s über-romantic Cello Sonata, where his partner was the Armenian musician Lilit Grigoryan, a gentle powerhouse and, by some margin, the most impressively responsive among this year’s pianists. These two players’ other collaborations, both singly and jointly, with German violinist Viviane Hagner (Brahms, Mendelssohn, Bartók, Babadjanian) were equally engaging and authoritative.

The most striking violinist was Greek-born Jonian Kadesha. He lacks nothing in technique or imagination. Yet he actually ends up playing everything in much the same way, with a great emphasis on gritty, grinding tone, on tiny, pearled sounds, and often on free-spirited embellishment.

He somehow suffocated older repertoire but came into his own in new works by Sally Beamish (Trance, a short memorial to her mother, like a single gesture emerging from pools of stillness in spite of its description as a chaconne), and Swedish composer Klas Tortensson’s In grosser Sehnsucht, a vivid, partly recited, flying, tumbling, musically theatrical setting of words by strong but distressed women. It was sung with fibre and finesse by German soprano Caroline Melzer, and Kadesha played in both works as a member of Trio Gaspard.

There was great singing, too, from London-based Australian mezzo-soprano Lotte Betts-Dean in her father Brett Dean’s Madame ma bonne soeur, a setting – full of pathos – of letters by Mary, Queen of Scots. Betts-Dean was also hugely impressive in American composer Jake Heggie’s musically rather dilute Camille Claudel: Into the Fire. The Armida Quartet from Germany were heard at their best in these two works.

[ ‘It was clear I wanted to play first violin. When you are leader you can really create energy’ ]

The Ragazze Quartet from the Netherlands provided Mozart with a sense of air and illumination that eluded the Armida. The Pacifica Quartet were, by comparison, classily old-style, mostly defaulting to a sweet and soft-grained style of delivery. It was they who gave the first performance of Donnacha Dennehy’s specially commissioned Chorale, a work sparked by the breathing issues in swimming, which the composer has recently taken up “quite earnestly”.

The music opens with intense, agitated gestures which lose energy and dissipate into a dilated calm, and sometimes morph through chorale-like sequences. It may be fanciful, but it was easy to relate what went on in the music to inhalations and exhalations of breath.

This year’s quartet stars were the Ardeo from France, whose approach to Beethoven (they played the Quartets in C, Op. 59 No 3, and in F, Op. 135) is jaw-droppingly precise, cliff-edge dangerous and had so many fresh perspectives, all based on what’s to be found in the score. It was like hearing Beethoven for the first time. A remarkable experience.

Irish soprano Anna Devin’s performance of Carl Heinrich Graun’s cantata Apollo, amante di Dafne with Ensemble Diderot included some real thrills, and the singer also gave a beautifully structured and sung recital with pianist Deirdre Brenner in which the standout numbers were songs in Irish by Ukrainian-born, Canadian-raised composer Anna Pidgorna, who chose texts for her Amhráin Chaointe that highlight remarkable women’s voices.

Greek-American violinist Ariadne Daskalakis performed Biber’s Rosary Sonatas, one of the great landmarks of 17th-century music that notoriously requires a multiplicity of instruments to deal with the different tunings it demands. Her three concerts with Ensemble Vintage Köln of this still startlingly original music, including specially commissioned, touching readings by Ruth Padel, were utterly absorbing. And Israeli violinist Nurit Stark was riveting in the late Sonata for Solo Violin that Bartók wrote for Yehudi Menuhin in 1944.

Oh, and beyond the music, the next stage in what’s provisionally called the Bantry Music Centre was revealed locally just before the festival started. McCullough Mulvin Architects have come out top in a competition to design a new venue that will serve the town’s three festivals (literature and traditional music as well as chamber music), and also provide educational resources for the area. It will be a just reward for the extraordinary annual cultural activity that’s grown up in a town with a population of less than 3,000.