It wasn't just Wimbledon which was affected last week by rain. The West Cork Chamber Music Festival in Bantry suffered even more heavily, with a wider variety of rains than anyone could have wished for falling with puckish insistence and unpredictability. But such is the quality of the festival's musical offerings, that no one - not even the people who had decamped to Bantry with young children - seemed to mind too much.
The festival, which has gone from strength to strength since its launch in 1996, and this year featured an art exhibition by Tim Goulding and an impressive literary strand, established itself as the premier event in Ireland's music calendar at the very outset. Nothing else even approaches it in style of programming. There's the sheer luxury of the way it mixes freely from the entire repertoire of solo and ensemble pieces in single concerts. The closing concert alone, for instance, called on a pool of 15 players to yield a wind quintet, a violin duo, a set of songs, and a string sextet. There's the adventurousness of choice that's exercised within that repertoire, this year extending from period-performances of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Boccherini and Bach, to the Arditti Quartet in astonishing, lucid performances of some of the most challenging and knotty pieces of our own time.
There's the festival's investment in the future, through a series of master classes both central to its ethos and crucial to its character. The musicians of the future are being groomed and shaped by their experiences in Bantry. There's a range of tuition that's not to be found anywhere else in Ireland. This year's tutors included Irvine Arditti, the RTE Vanbrugh Quartet, the legendary Amadeus Quartet's Siegmund Nissel, cellist Christophe Coin, soprano Patricia Rozario, pianist Joanna MacGregor, as well as other luminaries playing at the festival (and the leading Irish traditional fiddler, Martin Hayes). And, hand-in-hand with all of that, the young musicians get to hear the festival concerts.
For me, the most remarkable experience of the festival was hearing the last of the three young Irish string quartets, which played on Sunday afternoon. Ioana Petcu, Sarah Sexton, Samantha Miller and Sarah McMahon simply took my breath away with their playing of Schubert's Quartet in A minor. Here, they showed a highly-developed sense of the internal relationships of a fully-functioning string quartet. The intonation gelled, the sense of give and take was effortless, and the judgment of scale was beautiful - small by today's standards, but always apt. This was Schubert-playing of unusual depth, simple on the surface, with an unusually pure lyricism, and hauntingly dark and complex underneath. I don't think I've ever heard a professional quartet give such a rewarding performance in concert. The IRMA Trust has put everyone in its debt by making possible this strand of the festival's activities this year (and a black mark to the Arts Council, who which turned it down without a penny). Other highlights of the final weekend included the Arditti Quartet's afternoon concert, crowned by the explosive, outrageous, boundary-stretching Tetras by Xenakis. This is an Arditti speciality - it was written for them - and they make it an unforgettable experience. It's music which forces itself on you with irresistible urgency, and the enthusiasm of the audience's response matched the way audiences everywhere seem to take to Xenakis's superficially rebarbative work. With an amount of grinding and grating that could be seen as typifying the least palatable of contemporary music, he re-writes the rules and goes successfully where few dare to tread. And audiences love it.
The Ardittis were later joined by Danilo Rossi (viola), and Alban Gerhardt (cello) for a sublime performance of Schoenberg's Verklaerte Nacht, which, with Beethoven's Grosse Fuge, has to be one of the few works actually written in the 19th century that forms part of their repertoire.
John Tavener's specially commissioned The World was a damp squib of an affair - not a magical turn of phrase or moment in the harmony to relieve the tedium of a formulaic setting. Soprano Patricia Rozario shines in the high-lying parts Tavener writes for her. But over the week, her art elsewhere came to seem very limited and mono-dimensional. When the music doesn't call for the special qualities of her Tavener range, her singing comes across with expressive flatness.
The Trio Parnassus's handling of Korngold's Suite for two violins, cello and piano (the extra violin being Catherine Leonard) was an exhibition of unique cast. The work was written for the single-handed pianist, Paul Wittgenstein, and Trio Parnassus's Chia Chou seemed hell-bent on showing that he could single-handedly dominate anything the other players could throw at him. The crude and noisy posturing of his music-making was further from the intimate spirit of music-making in Bantry than anything else I've heard in four years there.
Such is the richness of Bantry, that this (and the trio's other performances) were ultimately but a small blip on a remarkable festival. This year's packed schedule saw equally packed houses, and music-lovers should note that the promised Shostakovich cycle from the Borodin Quartet has finally been announced. The dates are April 23rd to 28th next year. And the festival itself starts on June 25th. Get out your diaries now.
