West Cork Leads the Way

THE Debussy String Quartet of 1893 was, up until now, the newest piece ever to be included in an opening concert of the West Cork Chamber Music Festival. This year, however, when the 1999 festival opened in Bantry House on 27 June, Mozart's C Minor Wind Octet and Schubert's Death and the Maiden flanked a performance by the Arditti Quartet of Arcadiana, composed in 1994 by Thomas Adès (b.1971). What most emphatically signalled a new direction in West Cork was not so much the intrusion of the twentieth century upon the opening concert as the performers who were taking part. The members of the Arditti Quartet are acclaimed as the world's leading exponents of the contemporary string quartet repertoire and it was they who were West Cork's main guest artists-in-residence for 1999. Their participation throughout the week of the festival was the key component of a programme which, while also including plenty of mainstream chamber music repertoire as well as the original instrument quartet, Quatuor Mosaïques, featured an unprecedented focus on the music of our own time.

In fairness, the four-year-old festival has always included contemporary music within its much-praised artistic programmes. Music by John Tavener has appeared every year since the festival began in 1996, a tradition which continued this year. Robert Simpson featured in the first three years, as have Irish composers Jane O'Leary, Patrick Zuk, Raymond Deane and Ian Wilson, mostly with works commissioned specially for the festival. 1998's Russian-themed programme included Schnittke and late Shostakovich.

By comparison, however, the post-war music content of the 1999 festival constituted something of an explosion. Pianist Joanna MacGregor, returning to Bantry for the third year in a row, gave a late-night recital of John Cage's Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano, preceded earlier in the day by a talk on the music and an opportunity to observe the actual preparation of the piano. There was a performance of Jane O'Leary's Distant Voices and the Irish premiere of John Tavener's Wake Up and Die, both for cello octet. But at the heart of this year's festival is the RTÉ Vanbrugh String Quartet in the world premiere of quartets by John Tavener and Gerald Barry, both festival commissions, and the Arditti Quartet in works by Adès, Kurtág, Ligeti, Schnittke, Xenakis, Ferneyhough and MacMillan.

It is festival director Francis Humphrys -- English-born, now twenty-five years farming in West Cork -- whose passion for music and whose boundless enthusiasm are the cement which makes everything hold together. He describes the ethos of the festival as 'exploring the repertoire in as many ways as possible and always searching for something new and being open to it'. A model of practising what he preaches, Humphrys immersed himself in the Arditti Quartet's immense discography before approaching leader Irvine Arditti with a list of requests for the festival programme. As Humphrys reveals with unabashed candour, his original selection tended towards tamer options, nervously skirting the Arditti's core avant-garde repertoire. 'He [Arditti] said, "Hmm, you're not choosing what we're really known for...".' Humphrys laughs. 'So then Xenakis and Ferneyhough creep in. And that's a very interesting exercise for me, finding out from him what he thinks is important. And I mean, he really is at the cutting edge of contemporary music. Some of the things which I've chosen or which we've chosen between us are what he would call classical. For example, Bartók 5 was being considered at one stage, and that is definitely classical as far as he's concerned.

'There was a lot of stuff I listened to that I just couldn't get my ear around at all. But late Beethoven was considered impossible in his time. And I think that's actually something we all have to bear in mind when we're listening to contemporary music. Brahms was considered impossible, they were all considered impossible -- by the traditionalists. And yet, they've taken their place in the canon. So who are we? You have to give contemporary composers a chance. And there's a huge mountain of their music and it really is difficult to listen to all of it and make judgements. But nonetheless there are names that stand out for one reason or another.'

Among those names, according to Irvine Arditti, are some of those appearing on the West Cork programme. 'You've certainly got some composers there who are, like us, at the cutting edge. And certainly Ferneyhough, Xenakis and Ligeti are such. Kurtág is a little easier to understand, I think. And James MacMillan and Tom Adès are writing much more comprehensible music. And we're also playing Schoenberg. So there's a bit of a mixture, which is nice, and it also fairly represents our repertoire. Now there are some composers there with whom we've had a great association: Xenakis, Ligeti, Ferneyhough, and so on. I think it isn't a daunting prospect for the audience if they're just prepared to be a tiny bit open. If they come along completely closed and say "This is not music" before we play a note, then it's difficult. There is something there for everybody, and no one need worry unduly!'

Humphrys admits to some slight worry himself, wondering each year if people may simply avoid certain concerts, but Christopher Marwood, Vanbrugh cellist and West Cork's artistic director, is fully confident after the outstanding achievements and following of the festival's first four years. 'We hope that we have built up a trust. And now we're trying to introduce some more of the fantastic music that there is from this century. What inspired us to do this is that the atmosphere during the festival is very conducive to people feeling able to explore this sort of thing. There are several contemporary works which we put on in the first two or three years and we were stunned by people's reactions -- because they're in the mood for it, I feel. And it's just been great to see that people suddenly find that this is a language that they can understand. The festival situation is absolutely ideal for introducing new music.'

Marwood agrees that the festival has a responsibility to fulfill in this regard. 'But I hesitate to put it in didactic terms: "we want to teach you that this is good". That's not what we're about at all. It would be in the spirit that, "we've discovered that this music is great and we want to share it with you". That's how it is. We wouldn't present the works that we present in the festival if we didn't believe that they were really great works worthy of presenting. We take great care in the way we select the repertoire. And also there's the immediacy of the performance. Just being involved in the live performance is the best way -- the only way, really -- to explore new music.'

His experiences with the Vanbrugh Quartet have persuaded Marwood that the ideal introduction to unfamiliar music is the mixed programme. 'So many times, when we've taken various new works around on tour, people have come up to us at the end of the concert and said, "We didn't think we'd enjoy that but we really did". We do something new in the middle of a programme of known, great repertoire -- Beethoven, Mozart, whatever -- and people just don't expect to enjoy it. And then they do.' On this point there is much agreement. 'I think the whole festival is geared in this way', says Irvine Arditti. 'There's only one concert where we're actually playing alone. All the other things are mixed. And I think that's probaby a very good way to do it. And we're used to being sort of diplomats for new music and trying to encourage people to understand it.'

Raymond Deane, whose string quartet,Brown Studies, was the festival's Irish commission last year, vouches for the value of incorporating new music into events like West Cork rather than isolating it in specialist festivals. 'It's the way to go: getting out of the ghetto and mixing everything up. And I think it's wonderful that a place like West Cork -- with that wonderful old house and so on -- is kind of showing up the establishment here in Dublin who never do anything of the sort. I think they deserve a clap on the back because they've got the courage. Francis Humphrys is obviously somebody with a great passion for music and completely unprejudiced.'

Brown Studies, he says, ended up being in four movements and the nearest thing to a traditional string quartet that he has written. 'It is a piece that is deliberately a kind of meditation on the string quartet medium as such -- the history of the string quartet, with quotations from Beethoven Opus 132 which -- by sheer coincidence -- had been performed the previous night by the Borodin Quartet. So I personally felt that my quartet, as it happened, was in a very good environment for it to be performed, because the context was there all around it. It was a magical thing for me to have it done in that environment and in Bantry House. I have just come back from hearing it played in the church in the Irish College in Paris, another very strange environment. The other place where I've heard the same piece is in the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin. These are all kind of old places, which I must say I much prefer to having them performed in an antiseptic, new music auditorium. I like a place that is kind of redolent with the particular tradition, even if the piece is questioning that tradition.'

Questioning, exploring: to these words Francis Humphrys adds another: experimenting. 'I think that it's important to experiment. And I think that a festival is an opportunity to experiment. And an opportunity not just for musicians and the people who put the programme together, but for audiences as well. And the people who make the commitment to come down here, perhaps because some favourite pieces are being played, will also go on to explore new avenues from Baroque to Ferneyhough. New works tell us things about ourselves, and if we don't listen, we're opting out on our responsibilities, not just as musicians and festival organisers and so on, but as an audience.'