In a normal year next Friday would see the first of over eighty events – chamber music concerts, quartet masterclasses, artist interviews, instrument making workshops and talks – take place in Bantry, bringing over a hundred musicians from all over the world to the town. But just because Fate and the Virus intervened so dramatically, it does not mean the Festival should cancel all music making.

The international nature of the Festival gave us the opportunity to gather together some of the cancelled Festival musicians in a selection of venues around Europe and USA. Programmes were thought up that took into account the isolation of the last three months and production companies were located to film and record the performances as lockdown regulations were relaxed over the last ten days. Although the concerts will be pre-recorded, it is the nearest we could get to live performance. As I write the first three performances are safely logged in, of the rest some are still being edited and two have not yet taken place. Such uncertainty is the nature of the times.

Despite everything it is still Beethoven Year, so the great Vadim Gluzman will play the Spring Sonata in a studio in Chicago, Rosanne Philippens will perform the Kreutzer Sonata in Amsterdam and also in Amsterdam Dudok Quartet will bring us the stupendous late Quartet that climaxes with the maddest fugue in Western music. Schubert does not need an anniversary to justify several appearances – the brilliant Ukrainian pianist, Anna Fedorova, whose Rachmaninov concerto performances have been viewed millions of times, will join string players led by Mairéad Hickey in the greatest of the Schubert Piano Trios and his evergreen Trout Quintet. And the Signum Quartet, performing in Bremen, do a special line in arranging Schubert songs for quartet.

The lively French wind quintet, Ouranos Ensemble, performed in a part of Ireland, the Centre Culturel Irlandais, in Paris, while the Dagda Ensemble, led by Caitriona O’Mahony, were hosted by the Triskel in Cork to tell the story of the women composers who led flourishing careers in seventeenth century Italy and France.

Meanwhile in the Henry Wood Hall in London, Bantry’s favourite violinist, Alina Ibragimova, took to the stage with Scottish pianist, Alasdair Beatson, to play well-loved sonatas by Mozart, Debussy and Ravel. At the same well-known venue, Doric Quartet recorded for us an early Haydn Quartet and Britten’s final one, known as La Serenissima for the final devastating Passacaglia was composed in Venice.