West Cork Chamber Music Festival

THE main feature of the second full three-concert day of the West Cork Chamber Music Festival was the premiere by the Chilingirian Quartet of the specially-commissioned Diodia by John Tavener. The title of this, the composer's third string quartet, comes from the Greek and refers to the toll houses "for the testing of souls as they pass through the space of the air in the layers of the under-heaven".

The work is constructed like a sequence of meditative stations, with material simple and plaintively haunting, in Tavener's familiar manner - discoursed at a succession of higher pitches before journeying back to its starting level. The progress is not always smooth. There are episodes of agitation and discordance, passages dominated by spare-sounding harmonics, others given over to lusher chordal movement.

It is a journey, says the composer, "that passes through incidents but leads nowhere, because we do not know the judgment of God". The actual close, however, is, in Tavener's quiet way, quite a Coup de theatre the viola-player sings "Remember me" as the other players hum. The charge communicated to the audience was palpable.

Highly-charged, too, was baritone Stephan Genz's late-night performance of Schubert's Winterreise, the wintry associations proving to have an aptness not normally to be expected on July 1st. Genz, who's still in his mid-twenties, has a gorgeous ease of delivery, a wideness of resource that enables the right mood, the right inflection simply to materialise; in short, a singer with the art which conceals art. His pianist, Rudolf Jansen, was less reserved, pushing and poking at the piano part with results which made Schubert sound at times like an inferior Hugo Wolf.

Earlier, the RTE Vanbrugh Quartet and Roberto Diaz had played - rather nervily, I felt - Mozart's great G minor String Quartet. And the day had opened with two Brahms sonatas, Anthony Marwood subtly lyrical in the Violin Sonata in G, Steven Doane passionately fired by the Cello Sonata in F minor. Susan Tomes, pianist to both, played with a grittiness which matched the latter much better than the former.