Classical music: West Cork Chamber Music Festival

Bantry House/ St Brendan’s Church

The 20th festival opened on Friday last with what I took to be a little piece of quirky humour — Mozart’s “Dissonance” quartet — on the part of the festival director, Francis Humphrys. It suggested, perhaps, that dissonance and its resolution might be the guiding philosophy underlying the music chosen for the week.

The programmes for the first weekend, however, were principally made up of music of the 18th and 19th centuries — safe, familiar music. Just four of the 21 works that I heard were written in the last 100 years.