West Cork Chamber Music Festival, Bantry House, County Cork, Ireland

Cork's Bantry Bay is where, in 1796, a French armada failed to overthrow the British and set up a Catholic republic. Now a more successful invasion takes place every summer, as the West Cork Chamber Music Festival occupies Bantry House, which overlooks the bay.

This multinational invasion is not part of the celeb festival circus. The ethos is egalitarian, even communal; you might overhear someone from Austria's Artis Quartet say to the Shanghai Quartet, "You know the Schoenberg concerto for string quartet and orchestra? It's crazy music, but fun to play."

"Fun to play" seems to be the festival's motto, but it doesn't go for easy options. Nor, by putting the musicians first, does it exclude the audience. Quite the contrary. On the evidence of the final weekend, the audience is mightily involved, at times almost proprietorial in its interest, but always benevolent.

Ensembles and soloists mix and mingle on and off the platform; in Sunday's final concert, the Shanghai Quartet's Honggang Li joined the RTE Vanbrugh Quartet in Brahms's Second String Quintet; the previous evening, sundry soloists joined the Artis in Strauss. It makes for a bracing fluidity, and if not every performance achieves perfect finesse, there is a compensating intensity of energy and attention.

The repertoire ranges from Baroque to the brand new, the latter represented on Saturday by the Vanbrugh's premiere of Zhou Long's Harmony. According to the composer, "in Chinese characters, the word harmony is composed of two parts"; his quartet accordingly presented two facets: Western expressionist angst and Eastern serenity, the two fused by woozy glissandos. A violently assertive five-note figure set things in motion, but wisps of ethereal melody soon generated a provisional calm; and so the pattern was established. Zhou Long's gift for open-hearted tunefulness at times bordered on the sentimental, but when he suddenly cut short the final moments of frenzied agitation, the sense of release was palpable. To immerse ourselves in the warmth of the expanded Artis Quartet's performance of Strauss's Capriccio sextet seemed a well-earned emollient.

For Sunday's final concert, Vienna's Altenberg Trio offered a mesmerising performance of Kagel's Piano Trio. This instrumental shaggy-dog story is full of red herrings, banana skins and blind alleys, the mixed metaphors appropriate for a work played with sly gravitas and profound musicality. There were probably few paid-up Kagelians present, but the response was certainly enthusiastic.

A short review cannot do justice to six concerts and multiple masterclasses in two days, but the mood was summed up in Saturday's late-night performance of Mozart's String Trio K563 by Ani Kavafian, Andrei Gridchuk and Colin Carr. Occasional slips and slurs notwithstanding, the impression was of civilised conversation carried on at the highest level of intelligence: the very embodiment of the chamber music ethos.

NICK KIMBERLEY

BBC Radio 3 will feature the festival in November