NOBEL Prize Winners was the legend on the Tuesday tickets for the West Cork Chamber Music Festival in Bantry. The plural was essential for, in addition to the much publicised presence of Seamus Heaney, the programme included John Tavener's Yeats cycle, "To a child dancing in the wind".
The day opened with a recital by Barry Douglas. The Belfast pianist was in wound up virtuoso mode, too much so, I felt, to find the right flexion of rubato for Chopin's Sonata in B minor.
He followed the Chopin with a thrills'n'spills, blockbuster account of Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition. Here he offered just the sort of blazing pianism which tends to enhance a performer's public reputation as a titan of the keyboard while, in the process, getting this particular piece a bad name. Whatever the impact on the standing of Mussorgsky's best known piece, this performance certainly brought the house down.
Tavener's Yeats settings, for soprano, flute, viola and harp (Veronique Dietschy, William Dowdall, Dominique Lobet, Andreja Malir) carry a sense of privacy and reticence, a dogged unwillingness, even, to upset the words. The result is strangely incantatory but not quite compelling.
The day's grand finale brought together Seamus Heaney (to read his Squarings) and Bach (in the form of the Sixth Cello Suite played by Robert Cohen). The meeting was one of contrasts, Heaney seeming relaxed in speaking word flights concretely anchored in time and place, Cohen sounding tighter and more tense in his ordering of the more elusive abstractions of the Bach. Bringing the two together generated for this listener neither special sparks nor unexpected resonance. It simply amounted to too much.
