MICHAEL DERVANsaw the West Cork Chamber Music Festival while MICHAEL SEAVERreviews Raw at the Clonmel Junction Festival

West Cork Chamber Music Festival
Bantry, Co Cork

The West Cork Chamber Music Festival has long been more than a sequence of concerts. The festival may never have explored the obvious potential of pre-concert talks, but it has long had an important master-class element, where student ensembles work with visiting musicians and also get a taste of recording studio activity with leading producer Andrew Keener.

This year the festival held its first composition competition, from which it paired each of four young composers with a different young ensemble for a workshop, rehearsals and a performance.

I managed to catch three of the resulting performances, of Rob Casey's Pieces of Stringfor piano trio, Michael Doherty's String Quartet No 2, and Ann Cleare's Orbis Tertiusfor wind quintet. I missed a fourth, Benedict Schlepper-Connolly's Reservoir of Heaven, due to the Quiet Music Festival's Shhh!marathon.

Each of the pieces I heard seemed to be exploratory. The dreamy, sometimes doodly nature of Casey's Pieces of Stringmanaged to find much more potential in the tonal resources of the piano than in either of the string instruments. Doherty's string quartet sounded like an instance of a composer trying on different outfits, from lyricism (which seemed easy and natural) to a dissonant aggressiveness (which sounded more forced), before ending up in an intriguing region of calm pain. Cleare's Orbis Tertiusbegan strongly with patterning which dissolved into the noise of wind without musical tone. On the evidence of this piece, Cleare sounds like one of those composers who has become fascinated with unorthodox methods of sound production.

The new pieces were all effectively delivered by the Lambay Trio (who also offered a persuasive account of Ravel's Piano Trio), the McGuinness String Quartet (a little bit too romantically ardent for my taste in Haydn's FifthsQuartet) and the Kelly Wind Quintet (who also enjoyed letting their hair down in Ligeti's Six Bagatelles).

Among the handful of other concerts I heard during the latter half of the festival, the standout performances included Alessandro Marcello's Oboe Concerto in D minor, with Spain's Lucas Macias Navarro (principal oboist of the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra) a mesmerisingly beautiful soloist whose expressive breadth almost managed to expunge the memories of a sometimes disastrous Fifth Brandenburg Concerto the previous day.

Italian mezzo soprano Cristina Zavalloni took the singing-actress route in a tonally ravishing account of Monteverdi's Il Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorindathat somehow undersold the moment-by-moment poignancy of the turns of the vocal line. Zavalloni was at her best in a selection of early Stravinsky songs, delivered with appropriate earthy character.

The high point of the festival's survey of Mozart's string quintets came in the Quintet in D, K593, from the Rosamunde Quartet with the RTÉ Vanbrugh Quartet's Simon Aspell on second viola. The had an apparent simplicity and lightness yet was never short of Mozartian profundity.

Sol Gabetta clearly won the hearts of the audience with the gorgeous tone she brought to two Vivaldi cello concertos and the gutsy extravagance with which she attacked a cello arrangement of Winterfrom The Four Seasons. The surprise audience success of the Fourth of July programme of American violin sonatas was the outrageously derivative (Stravinsky could surely have sued for breach of copyright), crude, but overwhelmingly entertaining First Violin Sonata of 1923 by George Antheil, played with inexhaustible energy by Patricia Kopatchinskaja (violin) and Hiroaki Ooi (piano).

It was interesting to have its obsessions juxtaposed with those of John Adams's Road Movies. And the highlight of the closing concert was Austrian composer Thomas Larcher's My Illness is the Medicine I Needfor soprano (Patricia Rozario) and piano trio. The text, of statements from patients in psychiatric hospitals, is taken from an issue of Benetton's magazine, Colors. Larcher set them - and they were here delivered - with heart-rending acuity.
MICHAEL DERVAN

Raw
Clonmel Junction Festival

Look up "aerial dance" in the Oxford International Encyclopedia of Danceand you'll be told to "see Circus". Go to an aerial dance performance and you might also end up seeing circus. More than 30 years after it emerged on the west coast of the United States, the art form is still in search of its aesthetic, swinging between trapezey spectacle and earnest artistic statement. Thankfully, Irish company Fidget Feet shuns empty virtuosity for the richer expression derived from contemporary dance.

Its latest work, Raw, premiered at Chadwick's Theatre for the Clonmel Junction Festival, seamlessly integrates aerial and floor-bound movement into a deeply dark and energetic portrayal of clubbing.

Coiscéim's director David Bolger has been brought in to shape the devised material and he is a perfect fit, counterpointing scenes and structuring a narrative that exposes the narcissism and supposed sense of community in clubs. Following an impatient queue along a red velvet rope, the four performers unleash joyous unison dancing that soon fragments into paranoid and often abusive individualism. This moral desolation is reflected in a breeze-block-and-corrugated-iron warehouse setting, as well as in Paul Shriek's costumes - more Mad Maxthan Ministry of Sound.

Bolger skilfully manages the extra dimension gained from jessant (springing) bodies. A crouching-tiger-like fight between Chantal McCormack and Jennifer Paterson is full of slow-motion lunges and exaggerated recoils, and later a screaming Paterson is yanked toward the ceiling as if on a bad high before being brought back down to the floor by concerned embraces. Composer and DJ Jym Daly is a constant presence above the action and his influence on the performers goes beyond providing the beats.

As the action develops, the club becomes a place of restriction rather than release, with Daly's character controlling mindsets as well as dancing. An attempted slam-dunk, ending with Daly quoting Morpheus from The Matrix, seems unnecessary, so although some loose ends are left fraying after the 75 minutes, Rawdoesn't suffer from the untidiness.
MICHAEL SEAVER