Classical music to hit the right notes during Holy Week
Holy Thursday (April 17) promises to be an auspicious date in the ‘classical’ music history of Cork. Since Radio Éireann succumbed to pressure to establish a professional ensemble in the south, Cork has had an international-calibre string quartet based in the city.
Since 1986 that position has been held by the RTE Vanbrugh String Quartet. Recently, however, RTE has inexplicably awarded that position to the Galway-based, Con Tempo Quartet.
Never short of ideas, the Vanbrugh Quartet, who have for the last 28 years made their homes in Cork are performing with the City of Cork Symphony Orchestra at City Hall, Cork. This will be the first of two fund-raising concerts to launch the National String Quartet Foundation. The second will follow on Good Friday, when the quartet will be joined by other outstanding players to become the Vanbrugh Camerata.
The Vanbrugh Quartet, whose enterprising musicians, along with Francis Humphrys, founded the West Cork Chamber Music Festival, are about to embark on what may turn out to be the most enduring of all of its contributions to music in Ireland. Among these contributions we may list its organising of European Quartet Week during Cork’s year as European Capital of Culture 2005, the performances (in addition to concerts in major concert venues), on the Aran Islands; collaborations with traditional musicians, and its commissioning and performing of new compositions from more than 20 Irish composers.
Perhaps, however, its establishment of a Scholarship Fund for young musicians as part of the West Cork Chamber Music Festival is what has prompted the latest enterprise.
The Vanbrugh Quartet Scholarship Fund, founded in 1996 to assist and enhance the studies of Ireland’s most gifted young musicians, has enabled more than 100 players to live, work, practice; to listen to all the concerts in the hothouse atmosphere of Bantry’s great international festival; to be coached by internationally renowned performers at the festival, and finally to perform the works that they have studied with such illustrious tutors.
Such experiences are both invaluable and impossible to replicate. Many of those young players learned so much about themselves and about the music profession that, having continued their studies at music colleges in Britain, mainland Europe, and America, they are now pursuing successful careers as soloists, chamber musicians, and orchestral players all over the globe. Several will be playing in the Vanbrugh Camerata chamber orchestra on Good Friday night.
The latest venture is the establishment of a National String Quartet Foundation. Already established as Artists in Residence to University College, Cork and lecturer in Chamber Music at DIT Conservatory, Dublin, Vanburgh’s aim is to promote the performance of string quartet music nationally and to create a variety of other projects in music education. It’s recent press release stated that it’s “working with partner institutions, including UCC, to develop relationships which will support the long-term objectives of the Foundation.”
Having witnessed its total commitment to “spreading the gospel of beautiful music-making” I have no doubts concerning this visionary project. One of its number, violinist Keith Pascoe, has been working with the mainly amateur City of Cork Symphony Orchestra for the last ten years. Among the soloists who have performed with that orchestra are Barry Douglas, Nigel Kennedy, Nicola Benedetti, and Keith Pascoe himself. In the Holy Thursday concert, Pascoe will play with the Vanbrugh String Quartet and then conduct the orchestra in two wonderfully melodic and dramatic Russian orchestral works. The first is Glinka’s ‘Ruslan and Ludmila’ Overture, a piece that contrasts brilliantly exciting, rushing, explosive tunes with a big, passionate folksong-like melody. The concert willbegin with the quartet playing a great audience favourite, the “Death and the Maiden” quartet by Schubert. It takes its name from a poem of the same name in which Death persuades a young maiden not to be afraid of him. The atmospheric accompaniment to Franz Schubert’s vocal setting gave him the idea of writing the set of gorgeously dramatic variations that make up the slow movement. Concert-goers who are unfamiliar with the sound of a string quartet (two violins, a viola and a cello) will, I am confident, fall under the spell of this beautiful music. To close this first of the fund-raising concerts, Keith Pascoe has chosen one of Tchaikovsky’s best loved works, the “Pathetique” Symphony.
On Good Friday night the Vanbrugh Camerata, a chamber orchestra comprising the Quartet plus beneficiaries of the Vanbrugh Quartet Scholarship Fund, will provide the support for Keith Pascoe as he reprises the solo violin role in Vivaldi’s evergreen Four Seasons. This was one of the first works that Keith played as a soloist in Cork and I have vivid memories of himself and Nigel Kennedy ‘duelling’ when Kennedy subsequently came to perform the concertos with the City of Cork Symphony Orchestra.
To begin the concert, though, the Vanbrugh Quartet will be joined by singer-songwriter Mick Flannery in what promises to be a most moving performance. In 1785, Joseph Haydn was commissioned by a canon in Cadiz cathedral to write an orchestral work that would express in music the Seven Last Words of Christ, seven slow movements between which the Bishop would meditate and expound on the sayings. It proved a very difficult task for the composer but the Introduction and seven Adagio movements — plus the ‘Earthquake’ finale — have, ever since, proved enormously popular.
Mark Steinberg, leader of the Brentano Quartet in the US, commissioned the Canadian poet, Mark Strand, to write poems that would have universal relevance yet parallel in a non-religious way, the sacred Words from the Cross.
He succeeded admirably and Mick Flannery will be the Narrator of Strand’s highly emotive poems in this Good Friday performance, one that I am eagerly anticipating.
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