Shostakovich in burdened tones

THE second day of the West Cork Chamber Music Festival saw things in full swing. Master classes in the morning were followed by a 5 p.m. piano recital (Hugh Tinney), an 8.30 pm. concert of Mendelssohn songs (Christ a Pfeiler with Rudolf Jansen) and Shostakovich's E minor Pianqt Trio (Anthony Marwood Steven Doane and Joanna MacGregor), and a 10.30 pm., session featuring the Mendelssohn Octet (with the combined RTE Vanbrugh and Chilingirian String Quartets).

At the heart of the day's proceedings was the Shostakovich, Trio. The performance of this wartime work, written largely in the calm of the Soviet artists' retreat at Ivanovo, was interlaced with Michael Longley reading from his Ghetto, a juxtaposition gauged to highlight the music's connections of Jewishness (the material of the finale) and mourning (the dedication to the composer's recently deceased friend, Ivan Sollertinsky).

Most performances I've heard of this piece find a relieving lightness in its rhythmic life. From the players in Bantry, the music spoke always in burdened tones, granitic, savage, shattering. The darker side of Shostakovich is rarely delivered in concert with such overwhelming conviction.

It would normally be hard to imagine Mendelssohn's youthful, effervescent Octet serving as an anti-climax to anything. But in the wake of the Shostakovich, even after a 30-minute break, no other fate was open to it on this occasion.

And, although Mendelssohn's generally soft-centred songs were better served by ChrisIa Pfeiler than Brahms the previous evening, she didn't really manage to make a persuasive case for hearing 12 of them at a single sitting.

Hugh Tinney offered a commendably disciplined, unfrilled reading of Liszt's B minor Sonata, which, for me, served as a useful corrective to both the wilder and more willing performances which were heard during the Guardian Dublin International Piano Competition in May. More interesting still was his handling of Raymond Deane's After Pieces, especially the first, which he intriguingly conveyed as a sort of moto perpetuo in slow motion.