View from the Green Room: Chamber Music Festival ends with a Chinese cracker
Performers at Waterford Chamber Music Festival.
The sun shone brilliantly, the Chinese Room in Mount Congreve fills with chatter and laughter, greetings exchanged and hooplas for the quality of the work we had heard all weekend and Billy O’Brien, Artistic Director of the Waterford Chamber Musical Festival, beams that smile of accomplishment all artists recognise when success dances on your door.
A Mozart Clarinet Quintet is as rare a bird as some of Mount Congreve’s flighty residents and the audience warmed to the elegance and depth of the composition.
It is Mozart's only completed clarinet quintet and is one of the earliest and best-known works that was written especially for the instrument. It remains to this day one of the most admired of Amadeus’s works.
The interplay between clarinet (Seamus Wylie) and the quartet of Siobhán Doyle and Jennifer Murphy on violins, Alison Comerford on viola and Aoife Burke is a delight.
Alfred Einstein notes that while the clarinet "predominates as primus inter pares" – first amongst equals – this is "chamber music work of the finest kind with roles distributed equally over the entire quartet".
Dianne Marshall’s harp performance over the Valse Mélancholique with Maeve O’Rourke on flute and Ravel’s Sonatine, a short sonata arranged by renowned harpist Carlos Salzeda – with Maeve again on flute and Alison on viola – are winners with this afternoon’s audience.
Dianne’s work on the Ravel is particularly challenging with over 458 pedal changes on the harp pedals. Wow!
Soprano Róisín O’Grady sweeps through a suite of Ravel songs with all the class and quality we have come to expect from her. There’s also a Fleur de Bleus from Debussy and Tournier’s La Lettre de Jardinieur – a letter of gentle seduction with a garden full of flowers and beauty just waiting for Mademoiselle to return to complete their joy, "for the garden without you" is like "a tree with no nest". Romantics reveled in the use of the rich abundance of fruit and flowers to suggest sexual intimacy.
Claude Debussy continues the theme with a flowing ‘Fleur des blés’ (‘Field Flowers ) – a song composed in 1881 from a setting of a poem by André Girod. The song is a lyrical piece, where the composer uses musical imagery to evoke the beauty of flowers found in a field of golden wheat and Róisín sparkles with the romantic setting of both pieces.
Ravel’s full-bodied harp concerto with the wonderful Dianne Marshall on harp, Meadhbh O’Rourke on flute, Seamus Wylie on clarinet, Siobhán Doyle and Jennifer Murphy on violins, Alison Comerford on viola with Aoife Burke on cello has the Chinese Room rocking. This is a big band, full instrumental sound concerto that’s full of colour and show off virtuoso opportunities for everyone.
Remarkably, the piece was commissioned in 1905 by the Érard harp manufacturers to showcase their new double-action pedal harp in what is now described as a gem of a miniature harp concerto.
This Chamber Music Festival ends with a Chinese cracker.
