One of the many charms of the East Neuk Festival is the intimacy of the diverse venues it inhabits in this far corner of Fife. But prettiness counts for little without depth, and it is the continuing thoughtful exploration of the chamber repertoire, by artists such as Alexsandar Madzar, whose afternoon concerts of Bach Partitas thrilled, that marks out the East Neuk.
There’s also an adventurous strand, somewhat in abeyance this year, that counters all that rigorous polish. It ghosted a programme from Richard Egarr and the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, loosely based around transcendence, in this year’s new venue, Younger Hall, St Andrews, which aimed to take listeners in a musical elevator up to the Heavens, but kept stalling along the way.
Bach’s Violin Concerto in E was pleasant enough in the hands of soloist Isabelle Van Keulen (leader of the Leopold Trio), and the incessant, growing motifs of John Adams’s Shaker Loops quivered fitfully, like bacteria reproducing in a petri dish. There were moments when it seemed to coalesce: Ives’s Unanswered Question, its off- stage brass blasting too intently, and Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony both reaching for something greater than the sum of what we know. But it was left to Van Keulen to reach the summit with Vaughan Williams’s Lark Ascending, exquisitely delicate, yet at times lacking the wing power to gain its full height.
Back to the familiar the following evening in lovely Crail Church, where Christian Zacharias’s organic, fluid exposition of the recurring ideas in Beethoven’s Piano Sonata in F was echoed in the Leopold Trio’s delicate treatment of Schubert’s eddying String Trio in B flat. The sum combined to dazzling effect in Brahms’s meaty and ferociously intense Piano Quartet in G minor, with its effervescent, Hungarian finale played with unmitigated vim.
Similar commitment, too, from the Elias Quartet the following day in stunning St Monan’s Church. Halting, then robust in Beethoven’s Harp Quartet, it was the raw, half-crazed intensity with which they magnified Mendelssohn’s grief-stricken String Quartet in F minor that endured.