Francis Humphrys, Festival Director for the West Cork Chamber Music Festival, writes for Culture about this year's event, which runs from June 28th - July 7th.
The image of the secret door that we never notice is a powerful one. We walk past it every day and just fail to see it hiding there in full view, until one day quite suddenly there it is, inviting us to push it open. Sometimes we choose to go inside, other times we just let the moment pass and walk away, later we may go back to try to find the door we never opened. The path not trod is always the one we regret like the lover lost in a haze of misunderstandings.
Chamber music has this same air of mystery – where exactly does it lead, where or what is the chamber? In Ireland we have no recital hall, no chamber specially built for this music. So like with so much else, we make do with what we can find. The days when every vehicle on the western seaboard was held together with baler twine have sadly passed, but the places that we have for music-making have not yet found their way into the nineteenth century let alone the twenty-first. Nonetheless, the spaces we have discovered in Bantry have improved on the hotel room in Clonmel where in 1841 the great Liszt played to 25 people. The famous pianist and composer was feted all over Europe, but the word of his genius had failed to reach Ireland.
Today Ireland's chamber music haven lies at the head of Bantry Bay. There the annual celebration of chamber music will bring 110 musicians, masters and students, established composers and apprentices, string players and wind players, solo sopranos and vocal consorts, pianists and harpsichordists, national and international Baroque ensembles, young prize-winners and living legends, to gather in Bantry for ten days of intense music-making. The dedicated music-lover could conceivably attend six concerts in a single day. There are also masterclasses for quartets, pianists and a Baroque ensemble, there are free Fringe events, public artist interviews and talks and a major exhibition of Irish and international string instrument-makers and bow-makers. You will even be able to hear one of Liszt’s Hungarian extravaganzas played by a brilliant Russian on a Steinway piano in a room that looks onto an Italian Garden.
Maybe it is the sea air or the lived-in splendours of Bantry House or the scintillating view of mountain and sea or the famed West Cork hospitality, but musicians who can fill London’s Albert Hall or Vienna’s Musikverein or Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw are always delighted to return to Bantry. Audiences from all over the world are bemused that such a rare feast can be found so far from the great centres of music in St Petersburg, Berlin, Vienna, Prague, Budapest, Paris, Rome, Amsterdam, New York, London.
A single work will stand for all – Mozart’s E flat Divertimento is one of music’s best-kept secrets. You open this unassuming, hidden door labelled Divertimento that you never before noticed and suddenly you are face to face with three glorious musicians playing in candlelight the purest, most exquisite music you have ever heard.
The West Cork Chamber Music Festival will take place from Friday, June 28th to Sunday, July 7th, in and around the town of Bantry - find out more here.
