Francis Humphrys: Magic moments from 30 years of West Cork Chamber Music Festival

Irish Examiner

4 days ago

'I'm not sure I could pull something out of my rather decrepit brain,' protests Francis Humphrys when asked to list some highlights of the West Cork Chamber Music Festival, which this year celebrates its 30th birthday.
And the response can only be: pull the other one. He may recently have posted his own 80th birthday but Humphrys still seems as sharp as ever, and has just the finishing touches to the official programme for this year's festival, which begins on June 27 next and continues until July 6. The latest programme has 146 pages; by comparison, the edition for the first Festival back in 1995 had 56 pages - 'which wasn't bad'.
Humphrys is chief executive officer of West Cork Music, which plans and stages three festivals every year in and around Bantry: The Chamber Music Festival, the Literary Festival, and the Masters of Tradition Festival, and his memories of the very first Festival - complete with his property deeds in the bank as collateral - are still vivid and coloured by the topsy turvy adventures of the years that have since passed, marked by fretting over budgets and scoring new, emerging and big names from the world of classical music and beyond, successfully cloistering them in West Cork for a few weeks.
It's quite an achievement, even if he jokes that '30 years is chicken feed'. Below are some of the highlights, but as he explains: 'The most captivating concerts in the festival are the late nights, especially the ones in Bantry House. We've got the candles lit and all that. It works, it works very well."
Bantry House provides an impressive setting for many of the events at West Cork Chamber Music Festival. Picture: Denis Scannell
1995: Seamus Heaney
"I think the first festival is a place to go, because what's interesting there is the seeds of the Literary Festival are also sown, because our big event was Seamus Heaney coming, and that was the year that Seamus won the Nobel Prize. A number of gods were smiling on us that year.
"I did invite Seamus, but long before the Nobel Prize came on, but that really put us on the radar, in a way. I don't think we would have been otherwise. Bantry House [used as a venue] was a great attraction.
"I asked Seamus to come and read a long poem of his called Squarings [made up of 48 12-line poems]. And we did it alongside a very, very good cellist playing Bach's last Cello Suite. So there is a movement of the cello suite, and then Seamus would read, and then another movement, and Seamus would read, and so on. It was a packed house, and it went very well. He's such a gentleman, that man. He was wonderful. After he'd won the Nobel prize, he rang me up and said, 'Francis, I'm still coming'. That was good. Obviously, he was being dragged all over the world at that particular point in time."
Seamus Heaney on one of his visits to Bantry. Picture: Eddie O'Hare
Ten years later, and Seamus Heaney's return to Bantry again lit up the festival.
"The thing about 2005, which was the 10th festival, it was also Cork Capital of Culture [European City of Culture]. We put on some fabulous programs, of which the Seamus piece was one. They gave us a bit of extra money to expand the artistic program. But it's always been like that with a festival. I go to these board meetings. We have a board, and I go to the meeting and say, the money will come. It just sort of parachutes in at the last minute, but, I mean, you really had to work on that European funding, but we had done the groundwork, if you like, we were there already. We just had to put it down in a funding application."
2010: Alina Ibragimova
Russian-British violinist Alina Ibragimova playing in Bantry.
"It's just fantastic having people come to Bantry. It really is, it's people who play to full houses in the great halls all over Europe. With Alina Ibragimova, she is another violinist who's been with us. The first time she came, she came outside the festival and she did all the Bach solo Sonatas and all the Bach solo pieces, the solo violin. She did them for us in the local churches. And not that long ago, she did them all in the Albert Hall to an audience of 1,000 people. And she comes almost every year. She has a string quartet who are coming back this year. They were here last year, she's been here almost every year now for 10 or 15 years.'
Humphrys recalls a show many years ago at Bantry House when Ibragimova performed a late night Schubert piano triumvia: 'People came out ... I mean… people were dumbfounded.'
2011: Nicola Benedetti
Nicola Benedetti was one of the headliners at the 2011 festival. (Photo by Jeff)
"Well, that obvious special person was Nicola Benedetti. The reason why I try and try to steer away a bit from this is that there are names that are famous to me and famous to chamber musicians, but the rest of the world hasn't heard of them. I think that's the problem with chamber music. It is a niche area. Nicola runs the Edinburgh Festival now. She's internationally famous, a fabulous musician herself, and she's done a huge amount for development of young musicians in England, and in the UK generally.
"You need people like her, big names like her, to generate private funding. She was great. She came two or three years. She came first with her then-boyfriend, who's a cellist, and they enjoyed being here. She could sit outside and not be bothered by people because she wasn't really known over here, you know, the music audience would have known who she was, but it's a great thing. You know, in Ireland, celebrities don't get pestered in the way they do elsewhere."
2023: Candle-light concerts
"The festival keeps an archive of all the works played and who played them. Currently after 29 Festivals there are 3,200 entries, ranging from under 50 works the first year to over 120 in recent years. Of course many works get repeated several times, especially the unrivalled quartets by that wave of composers beginning with the founder of the string quartet Haydn, his friend Mozart, Haydn's student Beethoven, who upset their orderly world and of course the song-writer Schubert.
"My favourite concerts have always been the candle-lit late-nights, a focus on a single work, the darkening sky outside and a deeply attentive audience. Two years ago the Paris-based (Paris, Berlin and Amsterdam are the great music cities of our time) Quatuor Ardeo, who return this year, gave a mesmerising performance of a Beethoven quartet composed in 1806, when Napoleon was imposing his will on Europe with his armies. This particular quartet, his Ninth, builds to a stupendous last movement climax delivered in overwhelming fashion by these four young women. Thus their return this year."
The Vanbrugh Quartet were regulars at the festival. Picture: Des Barry
2025: New visitors
Can you have a favourite memory from something that haunt happened yet? Maybe you can, and if so, it's testament to the power of music.
"It's not exactly the festival, but I was 80 last year, and my daughter, unbeknown to me, arranged a birthday party, and she also brought in a string quartet, and they played, and all the neighbours were there. And one of the neighbours was so taken by the performance by this string quartet that she's booked to come to a concert in the festival. So it does reach. You just have to get people to hear, to listen. You have to drag them in somehow or other. And that's where Bantry House came in, in the early days: people came to hear classical music in the kind of surroundings that it would have been played in 100 years ago or 200 years ago.
"What we found actually since covid is that our international audience has halved, they're not coming any more for many, many reasons. And I think that's true with all tourism, but our national audience has doubled. So people are kind of thinking, yes, this might be fun to go to."
The 30th West Cork Chamber Music Festival takes place from June 27 to July 6. See www.westcorkmusic.ie/chamber-music-festival