Kilkenny City this week is Kilkenny Arts Festival. It’s everywhere you look, from sold-out events to ceramic crafts at stalls outside Kilkenny Castle to local artists advertised in shop windows. It’s a festival town writ large, with far too much on to attend as an individual, and a real sense of something for everybody. I was there for Saturday and Sunday (10–11 August) of the opening weekend, and made it to most of the music events, which ranged from string quartets to contemporary opera to prog rock-inspired Malian music.

The Carducci Quartet played three concerts over the opening weekend of the festival, the first (before I arrived) featuring Beethoven, Glass and Shostakovich. The second, performed at lunchtime on Saturday in St John’s Priory, paired Mozart with Fanny Hensel (née Mendelssohn). The Anglo-Irish group performed Mozart’s seventeenth quartet, ‘The Hunt’, with all the energy and buoyancy the composer deserves. The group has an incredibly cohesive sound, at times giving the impression of four players on a single instrument.

This cohesion can have its drawbacks, and I felt like there were moments in the Mozart where the sound was so unified that some of the line detail was lost. That wasn’t the case with Hensel’s 1834 E-flat string quartet, its tender opening counterpoint beautifully realised. Hensel had written the first two movements and sketched a third as a piano sonata five years earlier, before adapting and completing it as a four-movement string quartet. It’s the latter two movements that are more convincing.

Carducci played the last concert I attended as well as the first, ending Sunday’s events with Osvaldo Golijov, Philip Glass and Steve Reich at the Set Theatre. Placed between Golijov’s Yiddishbbuk and Reich’s Different Trains, both of which meditate on the Holocaust, Glass’ fifth string quartet (1991) is probably his strongest work in the genre. Its first movement is short and evokes Pärt, with its lines walking in predictable parallel rhythm. The third movement scherzo almost feels like self-parody, with typical Glass motifs put through a laundry cycle of development.

Yiddishbbuk (1992) is inspired by an apocryphal psalm – ‘No one sings as purely as those who are in the deepest hell’ – with the first movement dedicated to three children murdered at the Terezin concentration camp in World War II. This work is powerfully emotive, juxtaposing moments of violence and pain with profound and sometimes very dark beauty.

Reich’s 1988 masterpiece, Different Trains, fuses the sound of live and recorded quartet with recorded voice and train sounds. I found the cello amplification a little heavy here, but it was a privilege to see this work live, and the performers had the balance perfectly judged in passing the melodic fragments back and forth with the recording.

Massive textures
The English conductor Gabriel Crouch took the podium for Chamber Choir Ireland’s two concerts in St Canice’s Cathedral, stepping in for Paul Hillier who has been ill. Their first concert, performed with strings and electronics by members of Crash Ensemble, was Jóhann Jóhannsson’s Drone Mass on Saturday night. Although I’d heard bits of this work previously in recordings, that’s no way to experience it. The space the music creates is vast, and it begs immersion.

With the musicians amplified into the cathedral space, and a drifting light show around and above them, this vastness was felt, with singers, instrumentalists and electronics creating monuments of sound. In his programme notes, Hillier postulates that the Mass of the title, which certainly isn’t a Christian liturgical mass, instead invokes ‘the seriousness of a Mass, a ritual.’ There is certainly a rituality to it, with the musicians almost sublimated in the music and individual parts rarely surfacing from the massive textures.

Chamber Choir Ireland returned to St Canice’s the following evening, with a palindromic programme beginning and ending with Brahms, followed by and preceding works for male choir by Schubert, the two halves of Wolf’s Geistliche Lieder, and at the centre, Ligeti’s Lux Aeterna. Putting Ligeti as the literal and figurative centrepiece is typical of Hillier’s programming, with Lux Aeterna’s lace of sixteen individual voice parts almost recontextualised by Wolf’s sensuous chromaticism. Chamber Choir Ireland were on fine form at both concerts, never losing clarity or shape with these challenging works, and Crouch, stepping into two complex programmes at short notice, showed an excellent rapport with them.

Fully modern
The Set Theatre on Saturday evening saw a performance by Bassekou Kouyate, a Malian musician and expert player of the ngoni, with members of his band Ngoni ba. The instrument, an antecedent of the banjo, is in Kouyate’s hands fully modern and he plays it like a lead guitar. This concert was a real crowd pleaser and by the end the audience, which had begun rather stiff, was dancing. Each song established a firm groove that acted as the basis of a series of solos.

Kouyate’s skill on his instrument was formidable, his solos extensive and imaginative, often making heavy use of a wah pedal. At one point, he grooved on a single note for several bars, wringing every conceivable way of playing it (and a couple of inconceivable ones) out of the instrument. At another, his solo pushed higher and higher, continuing to rise until his hands were almost touching. But the band was as good, the drummer breaking his backbeat to execute a pristine staccato roll on the high hat or getting the audience to clap a simple beat so he could layer increasingly complex rhythms over it; singer Amy Sacko had effortless agility and control – at one point she stunned the audience with a single note sung at full power for several bars without any noticeable preparation, seeming to have pulled it from thin air. The bass ngoni player, Mamadou Kouyate, was the backbone, tight but never as showy as his bandmates. This was four excellent musicians playing excellently together.

Internal turmoil
The characters in Emma O’Halloran’s opera double-bill, Mary Motorhead and Trade, produced by Irish National Opera and performed at the Watergate Theatre for several days at the festival, each gives us a glimpse into their lives and the flawed choices and circumstances that lead them to their internal turmoil. Mary Motorhead begins with an ominous bass pattern as we meet Mary (Naomi Louisa O’Connell) in her cell in Mountjoy. She describes how she sees history as Big History and Secret History, the former concerned with men and big events, the latter with the personal events that shape us. As she describes her theory of Secret History, the bass pattern is replaced by a pair of brightly coloured, though never quite comfortable, chords. For most of the opera she shares her own Secret History, her life as a wild girl and the problems she caused growing up, her hatred of the midlands, and a notably small number of personal relationships. We reach the end as the lights close in, as we finally learn why she’s in prison, and as her legs and the shadows of her legs bend like a spider’s. As the opening bass pattern returns like a march to the gallows, she’s left a weeping heap on the floor.

Trade sees an older and a younger man (John Molloy and Oisín Ó Dálaigh), each of whom is in a troubled heterosexual relationship and each of whom is a father, meeting for sex. The older man is paying the younger, but as the plot develops we see that the two men are starved of intimacy. The older man seeks emotional connection in this transactional relationship, and has no idea how to find it. The younger man returns this only once, talking about his daughter, but otherwise stays only because the older man variously pays, bullies, manipulates, or begs him to. This work almost resembled cinéma vérité, and I found myself far more conscious of the unfolding story than I was of the music, with the score and song amplifying the emotions of and connections between the characters.

Both operas are short, between them totalling just 90 minutes, and the libretto in both – by the composer’s uncle Mark O’Halloran, deriving from his plays – is terrific. Each of them establishes a question at the outset – why Mary is in Mountjoy, and why the older man is covered in blood – and delays the answer until near the end. And the performances by the three leads, singing operatically in Irish accents, were powerful, with O’Connell legitimately in tears at the end.

Kilkenny Arts Festival is a transformative event in the city, and even getting to every event I could I felt as though I was missing out. It was also a great joy to see almost everything at or near capacity – even O’Halloran’s double-bill, which had the twin challenges of being challenging contemporary opera and being (when I saw it) three days into its run. But the delight of this festival isn’t just the events themselves but the immersion in a festival given the room to spread out and play.

Kilkenny Arts Festival continues until Sunday 18 August. Visit www.kilkennyarts.ie.

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