The flames from the two dozen candles burning in the chandelier above the stage in the 19th-century library of the Bantry House mansion in West Cork drew your attention heavenwards... as did the closing moments of Olivier Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time. As Norwegian violinist Henning Kraggerud played these almost inaudible upper register notes, an entire audience held its breath, and maintained that silence after the last traces of music had vanished. Only then did the extended applause begin for a remarkable performance by Kraggerud, cellist Laura van der Heijden, clarinettist Mate Bekavac and pianist Alexei Grynyuk that brought the ten-day long West Cork Chamber Music Festival to a close on Sunday.
Festival founder and music director Francis Humphrys had said one of the themes of this year's festival was birdsong, but those birds were singing in a wildly diverse range of places. For Messiaen, the birdsong he weaves into the first movement of his quartet represents the freedom he and his fellow inmates could only dream about at the Stalag VIII concentration camp in Silesia where the composer was imprisoned after France was overrun by the Nazis. He wrote his 55-minute-long quartet for the players he had available – clarinet, violin, broken-down piano and a cello that reputedly had only three strings.
As is often the case in Bantry, the musicians had not necessarily played together before, but rose to the occasion. Bekavac, a Slovenian clarinettist who plays jazz and klezmer as well as classical, gave a demonstration of the outermost limits of human lung capacity with his extended notes in the clarinet solo movement. Van der Heijden proved herself to be the sister of soul on the cello for the second night in succession. Having brought proceedings to a near standstill with a stunning performance in the third movement of the Brahms Piano Quartet no. 3 in C minor on Saturday, she again squeezed every drop of beauty from Messiaen's fifth movement duo for cello and piano that is meant to evoke the eternity of Jesus. Grynyuk, who had his chance to shine earlier in the evening with a show-stopping performance of Liszt's exuberant Hungarian Rhapsody no. 6, was the perfect accompanist in the Messiaen, where much of the piano part consists of repeated chords intended – and succeeding – in creating a sense of timelessness.