Piers Lane is a top international pianist and he should fill a house of reasonable size anywhere in the world. Here he did not play solo and was happy to be simply a collegial musician: he accompanied singers, a violinist and took the piano part in a trio. But his presence, his modesty and ready collaboration as equal partner with other musicians were a constant delight. It opened with Jenny Wollerman singing, first, three Fauré songs: Les roses d’Ispahan, Au bord de l’eau and Après un rêve. There was a little much graininess in Wollerman’s voice in the first but her...  Read More »

The evening concert was held in the Cathedral: an all-Bach programme. The main draw was the appearance of two singers to perform cantatas. Four cantatas, each consisting in just one section and calling for one or two solo voices. The scoring was reduced in each case to a violin or viola plus continuo (Rolf Gjelsten’s cello and Douglas Mews on the harpsichord; in the case of the Cantata No 78, ‘Wir eilen’, Hiroshi Ikematsu added his plucked double bass to the continuo). Three chamber pieces and an organ work were included n the programme. It began with the Sonata for Bass...  Read More »

At lunchtime in the Nelson School of Music there was a charming recital from Swedish soprano Catrin Johnsson and New Zealand pianist Rachel Fuller in songs by Mozart, Sibelius, Stenhammer and from less-than-familiar Broadway sources. The scene changed in the evening, with a 2-hour drive to the Montana Brancott Winery, out of Blenheim, for a 6.30pm recital of Beethoven, Brahms and Chopin from pianist Piers Lane. Here the setting might have been a little too intimate for the good of the piano, a vintage Steinway that has been refurbished but whose somewhat uneven articulation was audible. The capacity of the recital...  Read More »

On the sixth day of the festival came the concert that many of the committed chamber music passionnées had most looked forward to. The superb Prazak Quartet had their own concert, and played music entirely from their homeland. It followed the pattern of all good concerts, with one very familiar, ravishingly beautiful work, one slightly less known but one which has attained masterpiece stature more recently, and a more modern but very accessible piece that scarcely anyone would know. In the Cathedral again (this festival used the Cathedral more than previous festivals have), the quartet opened with Janacek’s first quartet, named...  Read More »

At 1pm the festival broke ground by presenting a free concert in St John’s Methodist Church and Nelson responded by filling it. It was no miscellany of pop classics: the New Zealand String quartet was determined to give the people the real thing, Schubert’s String Quartet in G, D887 – his last quartet and a piece that cellist Rolf Gjelsten, in his introductory comments, placed together with Beethoven’s String Quartet, Op 131, as the greatest masterpiece in the quartet repertoire. It’s a ranking I support, in spite of the popularity of Schubert’s Death and the Maiden and A minor quartets. It...  Read More »