What's a fully-fledged, international chamber music festival doing in a place like Drumcliffe, Co Sligo? Showing that modern Ireland has more to celebrate than stag parties in Temple Bar, record house prices, and a quick route to the sort of traffic problems most European countries have been dealing with for years.
More specifically, the ESB Vogler Spring Festival is an annual celebration of the extraordinary phenomenon that is the residency of the Vogler String Quartet in Sligo. For most of the year, the Voglers' Sligo schedule is of regular concerts, education and community work. For the May bank holiday weekend they join with colleagues from Ireland and abroad for a bout of that mix-and-match style of ensemble playing at the highest level, which, in Ireland, is otherwise only found in Bantry during the West Cork Chamber Music Festival.
Comparisons with Bantry are inevitable. But, in many ways, the festivals are quite different. The Sligo schedule is compact, and it's a practical proposition to get to all the events. Bantry bursts at the seams with more activity than any individual could ever manage to take in.
St Columba's Church in Drumcliffe, with the grave of W.B. Yeats outside the door and steep slopes of the often cloud-capped Benbulben stark nearby, has a generous but un-muddy acoustic, marred only by the incessant caws of crows outside. By Bantry standards the space is large. But it's easy to fill with sound. In fact, if there is a failing, it's that it's easily over-filled, as one of this year's guests, the Chilean pianist Alfredo Perl repeatedly demonstrated. Perl's excesses were most regrettable in his partnership in songs by Tchaikovsky and Sibelius with soprano Orla Boylan, who has not, to my knowledge, performed this repertoire in Ireland before.
By contrast, the young Irish pianist Finghin Collins was a model of good taste, both in larger ensemble - a high-spirited reading of Dvorak's Op. 81 Piano Quintet with the Vertavo Quartet from Norway - and in his duo work with the musically arresting and technically commanding Swedish cellist, Torleif Thedeen, in Schumann and Prokofiev.
The Vertavos, one of those quartets in which the violinists take turns in the leader's chair, were at their best in the earliest and most recent works they played - Mozart's G minor String Quintet (with the Voglers' Stefan Fehlandt), gossamer light yet deeply probing, and Danish composer Per Norgard's 1997 Quartet No. 8, a programmatic diary of the pains of war, inspired by the first World War, and here performed only feet from a plaque in memory of some of those who fought in that dreadful conflict.
Most of the festival's highlights were works from the 20th century. It was good to hear the audience cheering Schoenberg's seminal Second String Quartet as loudly as other, altogether more popular repertoire. The Schoenberg, with its historically defining trespass into the realm of atonality, is both demandingly dense and lucid. And that's how the Voglers played it, with an astonishingly assured contribution from soprano Orla Boylan in the Stefan George settings of the last two movements.
The Voglers also played the Second String Quartet of Karol Szymanowski, the leading Polish composer of the first half of the 20th century. It was written in 1927, late in the composer's career, and is an intriguing stylistic melting pot of a piece, embodying with conviction a range of vocabularies that Szymanowski explored more purely in a range of other works.
The Voglers won for Szymanowski a more rousing reception than they did for Verdi's sole quartet, a piece more remarkable for the composer's evident skill in an unfamiliar medium than for the quality of its content. Gerald Barry's First Quartet of 1984 went the way of Verdi rather than Szymanowski. Unusually for this composer's work, it was the sectional proportioning which sounded less than persuasive in the Voglers' reading.
There was just one premiere during the festival, the string quartet, little sails by Deirdre McKay (born 1972), performed by the Vertavos. It's a piece in post-minimalist style, making much use of harmonics in that mode of flutey, rhythmic careering familiar from the work of one of McKay's teachers, Kevin Volans. What impressed most was the technical accomplishment of the writing, the skill with the medium rather than the message.
The festival deserves to survive well beyond the initial period of the Voglers' residence, due to reach its term next year.
