West Cork Chamber Music Festival review: Sweet sounds in Bantry
West Cork Chamber Music Festival, Bantry: Dana Zemtsov, Evelyn Grant, Anna Federova, and Francis Humphrys.
It was third time lucky for West Cork Chamber Music Festival as the immersive music festival finally celebrated 25 years with ten days of live music in Bantry.
Director Francis Humphrys responded to the current challenges by programming more recitals and this year’s festival offered an even greater range of repertoire than previous years.
For the first time, a choice of two evening recitals ran concurrently at the two main venues, a strategy that provided some insulation against the current vicissitudes and inevitable cancellations due to covid.
String quartets were at the heart of this year’s programme. In one evening at Bantry House, I heard three of the headline ensembles. The Cologne-based, Signum Quartet opened the evening concert at Bantry House Library with a morsel of Mozart.
Hot on their heels, the British, Doric Quartet gave us a bracing performance of Bartok’s second quartet followed by a premiere of Dark Matter Hunting, a work by Deirdre Gribbin inspired by astrophysicist Priya Matarjan who was in the audience. The biggest tingle factor came at the late performance of Brahm’s F minor quartet from the Czech, Pavel Haas Quartet with Boris Giltburg at the piano, the changing light from dusk to night and the flickering candlelight adding magic to the spirited playing.
The Belgian quartet, Quatuor Danel, made a convincing case for the quartets of Polish composer Mieczyslaw Weinberg, a friend of Shostakovich who fled Warsaw for Russia during WWII. At an afternoon recital at St Brendan’s Church, I heard two of his quartets, all seventeen of which were programmed for performance in Bantry this week.
The boisterous winds of the Orsino Ensemble offered a welcome antidote to the string timbre in a charming all French programme. The highlight was a witty 20th century work by Jean Francaix.
After a blustery and damp few days, the sun put in a brief appearance as Anna Fedorova arrived on the platform. Seated at the grand piano in a little black dress, the Ukrainian virtuoso had an almost ethereal platform presence and enthralled a full house at Bantry House for a performance of all four Chopin Ballades in a flawless performance.
Chamber music is the music of friends, and there was a sense of friends reunited in all the festival hubs in this seaside town. As one visiting artist said to me “We feel that we are at home”.
