West Cork Chamber Music Festival

/String Quartet in G D887.........Schubert

Two Songs Op 91..................Brahms

Five Songs from op 32............Brahms

String Quintet No 2..............Mendetssohn/

The Opening concert of the Chamber Music Festival at Bantry House on Sunday was very much an event of two halves. In a gesture of unusual generosity, the first half ran to Schubert's extended final String Quartet, D887 (played by the RTE Vanbrugh String Quartet), and Brahms's two songs with viola and piano (in which the wife and husband team of mezzo soprano Christa Pfeiler and pianist Rudolf Jansen were joined by Roberto Diaz).

The Vanbrughs were not on top form in the Schubert. Fluctuations of tempo in the first movement did not always convince and rhetorical preparation was allowed to take away from the characteristic pleasures of the composer's unexpected shifts in harmonic direction. The performance did settle as it went, with the Scherzo and Finale sounding more agreeably Schubertian than the first two movements.

The Brahms songs, two of his loveliest, suffered, depending on how you viewed it, from a too soloistically inclined viola player or a withdrawn singer. Either way, the voice was rather lost.

There were no such problems after the interval, when baritone Stephan Genz probed deeply into five of Brahms's dark Op.32 settings of lovelorn texts; here, too, Jansen's boney playing sounded altogether more apt than it had in the songs with viola. The closing work was the second of Mendelssohn's string quintets, in which the Chilingirian Quartet (this year's visiting "quartet in residence" at Bantry) were joined by the Vanbrugh's viola player, Simon Aspell. The quintet, as impeccably crafted as you would expect from the mature Mendelssohn, is a lesser work than Schubert's Quartet in G. But the Chilingirians and Aspell projected it with such a winning combination of sensitivity and resolve - and with such a potent inner adhesion of phrasing - that it brought the evening to a decidedly cheering close.