West Cork Chamber Music Festival bows out with brilliant Brahms

The finale of the ten-day long West Cork Chamber Music Festival is a special occasion, and to end the season on Sunday the audience in the library of the 18th-century Bantry House was treated to a virtual marathon ranging from rarities to romantic chestnuts. Over a span of three and a quarter hours, with two intervals, the programme offered one of Mozart's two duos for violin and viola, the last of Beethoven's violin sonatas, Rachmaninov's only cello sonata and the second of Brahms' two string sextets. Performers and audience alike rose to the challenge.

One of the charms of the festival, founded by Francis Humphrys in 1996, is that it brings musicians, young or experienced, from all over the world to this scenic port on the southwest coast of Ireland. Pairings and combinations of  performers that might otherwise never happen are a feature, not a bug. So Austrian-German viola player Emma Wernig and German violinist Viviane Hagner, who have played together before, opened the concert with Mozart's Duo in B flat major for Violin and Viola, K424. At evening's end they were thrown into the fray with four other string players for Brahms' furious Second String Sextet.

Wernig and Hagner made a good case for the Mozart duo which, by design, is intended to not sound too much like Mozart. That is because the Salzburg genius wrote it to help out Michael Haydn, who was having trouble finishing a commission. Whatever of its origins, it is a wonderful piece, with lilting melodies and intriguing interplay between the violin and viola that stresses similarities rather than differences.

That delight was followed by Irish violinist Mairéad Hickey and French pianist Jérémie Moreau in what was unfortunately a somewhat earthbound performance of Beethoven's Violin Sonata no. 10 in G major. They didn't seem to find each other musically until the last movement, the one with an opening theme that is so tuneful you want to sing along. They also captured the soulfulness of  the Adagio espressivo middle section, before rallying for the Presto conclusion, a part-redemption.

No excuses needed for the Rachmaninov Cello Sonata in G minor, performed by German cellist Claudio Bohórquez and Armenian-born pianist Lilit Grigoryan. Composed almost contemporaneously with his Second Piano Concerto, this is a somewhat odd piece in which the concerto seems to be rumbling in the background, threatening to break through, and the piano, likewise, is more partner than accompaniment. That said, both performers were superb and Bohórquez was outstanding in the Andante, a movement that could stand alone as a soundtrack to any romantic movie.

The Brahms Sextet was the evening's crowning glory, with Hagner and Hickey (violins), Wernig and Séamus Hickey (violas), and Bohórquez and British-born Christopher Marwood (cellos). From the opening semitone oscillations of the viola, Brahms plunges his listeners into an unstable sound world that includes a theme based on the first name of a love interest he dumped, a Bohemian-inspired Presto and a dance-like finale. That six musicians could put this together in a few days is a marvel. That they played it under the candlelit chandelier in the Bantry library made it magical.