theartsdesk at the Dublin International Chamber Music Festival - musical revelations, nature beyond

If, like me, chamber music isn’t your most frequent home, there are bound to be revelations of what for many are known masterpieces. Mine in recent years have involved Brahms, a composer I love more the older I get: the Second, A major, Piano Quartet, much less often heard than No. 1, at the 2018 Hatfield House Chamber Music Festival, and, last Friday, his First String Quartet from the Cuarteto Casals, also new to me, in an airy room looking out on Dublin’s Glasnevin Botanic Gardens.

I missed the first two concerts of this year’s DICMF, arriving on the Friday, but both were greeted with superlatives by friends: the Irish debut of The Hermes Experiment in Dublin Castle’s Chapel Royal on Wednesday, and the revival in Rathfarnham Castle of last year’s hit, Bach’s Goldberg Variations on the accordions of Dermot Dunne and Martin Tourish – as experienced in the elegant 18^th century Casino seating 32, one of the most exhilarating concerts I’ve ever attended. Strings in the Botanics seemed like a wonderful way to ease back into Dublin's summer life, though, and the Casals team (pictured above by Linda O'Shea Farren) excelled expectations. For the music of Boccherini and their compatriot Arriaga, they were able to engage the collection of Baroque and Classical period bows, a bonus of imaginative support from the Borletti-Buitoni Trust, through whose nurturing hands so many great musicians have passed. The beauty of Boccherini's Fifth Quartet lay in the natural-sounding ornamentions – birdsong at times to match the blackbirds in the Botanics – and a surprisingly stark, driven Menuetto. Arriaga's originality, which first struck me when the Scottish Chamber Orchestra presented his Symphony in D in the 1980s, informs the last of the three string quartets, his only works to be published in a much too short life (he died 10 days short of his 20th birthday), with striking invention especially in the finale. A hint of romantic melancholy here carried over in to the soulful Iberiana of Turina's La oración del torero, a perfect miniature to end an inventive first half.

Brahms's C minor Quartet deserves to stand alongside the near-contemporary First Symphony in the same key, though it features much less often in concert programmes. Both beg the question whethere we've ever truly acknowledged the structural originality of movements that take a scherzo's place. The symphony's is blithe and bucolic; the quartet's is about as far from being "a delightful intermezzo in a charmingly relaxed mode", the programme note's assertion, as you can get, at least until the trio, sharing the heartache of the comparable melancholy in the Third Symphony. Impassioned, intonation-perfect Vera Martinez, having swapped the first violin role with Abel Tomàs earlier in the concert, duetted eloquently here with a relative newcomer to the quartet, viola-player Cristina Cordero. The whole was so profoundly sustained that any encore would have been fatuous. Introducing his fascinating programme in the Palladian perfection of William Chambers' Casino at Marino (pictured above during the short break), William Butt pointed out that his 1699 Grancino cello predates both the building and the first of the Bach Cello Suites with which he opened his programme (he'll be back to play all six next year, and so will trumpeter Aaron Akugbo Azuba, whose recital with harpist Milo Harper I regrettably missed – again reports were glowing). Butt also gave credit to DICMF Artistic Director Ciara Higgins, who'd encouraged him to look at Rautavaara's Solo Cello Sonata, an austere work with what sounded like overtaxing double stopping at times, but haunting and authentic throughout.

The highlight, perhaps, was The Little Galway Bay Suite, commissioned from the viola-player of the Arditti Quartet, Garth Knox, for the 2024 Cellissimo festival there and premiered by Alban Gerhardt. Butt was accomplished enough to sing in the third of the four atmospheres evoking the sea Sounds around Galway which punctuate the Bach-with-a-twist of the bracing main movements. Higgins was also to the forefront in the first of three concerts in her ingeniously-planned morning, noon, afternoon and night sequence at Kilruddery House, its Orangery the bright, white location, looking out over the beautiful gardens with their Le Notre-style "long ponds" and massive beech hedges. Finghin Collins begins his note for a superlative CD piano selection, "The bright day is done", and in a post-concert talk with Higgins (the two pictured above) told us more, in observations that she had been inspired by Gerald Barry's "Midday" in the multi-composer Ros Tapestry Suite to think about "creating a programme based around different times of day". A Farmleigh House online concert was the result, followed by the disc. 

The 11.30am-noon programme gave us a magical, unbroken procession of five very different takes, from Cécile Chaminade's delicious Aubade, Amy Beach's A Hermit Thrush at Morn – more on that in commenting on its companion piece shortly – and Godowsky's pearly paraphrase on Schubert's "Morning Greeting" from Die schöne Müllerin to the 12 strokes of the noon bell in John Field's (un) Nocturne No. 18 in bright E major, "Le Midi" (the time was 11.59 when they appeared). Barry's piece is typically quirky: tense expectation of the Normans arriving on the south Wexford coast in 1169, at first represented by 30 repetitions of a tense phrase with pregnant silences in between (originally, Collins later told us, Barry had thought of 13, but changed his mind). Other gestures, including birdsong which is threaded, arguably, through the entire group of five, ring the changes. Thoughtful and articulate, Collins told us about his choices – on the disc, these works are followed by eight more, five to be featured at the end of the Kilruddery day – and the next release, focused around a restored Pleyel piano of the 1930s in Switzerland. With time enough to walk the grounds and ascend the hill for views across in a heavy shower of rain, the next recital was at 3pm, showcasing the charm and talent of soprano Ava Dodd, currently one of the Harewood Artists at English National Opera, with the supportive partnership of Finghin's sister – and renowned coach – Dearbhla Collins. This was a fascinating lesson in how a young singer can overcome a restricted palette and physical tension to open up and use the full body, a moving experience in itself.

By the time of "The Last Rose of Summer", the need for long phrases had encouraged the breath control, and Schubert's The Shepherd on the Rock, with limpid sounds from veteran clarinettist John Finucane – who brought a similar enchantment to Joan Trimble's Pool Among the Rushes – absolutely crowned the recital; you could feel Dodd's inner sense of soaring, of almost losing herself in the intensity of the moment (the Schubert performance pictured above by Luca Soners). 

Four more young singers – soprano Ami Hewitt, mezzo Gemma Ní Bhriain (also perfectly poised in songs by Ina Boyle and Clara Schumann), tenor Sean Tester and baritone David Kennedy – explored the patterns of love, nature and gossip in Brahms's Liebeslieder Waltzes. The two Collins partnered them (all six pictured right by Luca Soners), and made the refrains of Schubert's late, bittersweet Fantaisie compelling on every return. But it was Finghin's further, this time flanking, selection which left the deepest impression. Beach's companion-piece to the morn song, A Hermit Thrush at Eve, is more profound, and if that American bird has the sweetest tunes of all, our own mistle thrush comes close; serendipitously, one was singing in the woods above the Long Pools just before the concert.

Another Ros Tapestry Suite piece was flamboyant and at times threatening, Eric Sweeney's "Evening: The Lighthouse at Hook Head", and had its masterly counterpart in Schumann's "In der Nacht", No. 5 of the Op. 12 Fantasiestücke, where Finghin seemed genuinely possessed by its dark spirit, but always keeping the piano tone clear as well as powerful. Charm came before and after, with Clara's very personal "Notturno" (No. 2 of Soirées musicales) and Chopin's F sharp minor Nocturne, the ultimate balm. As with the Spaniards, revelations in the music and in the supreme artistry of the performers will continue to reverberate.

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