New Zealand String Quartet presents
“STORYTELLERS” – the 2026 Season
Part One: ORIGINS
MIKA CORNELIUS – Universal Veil
FRANZ SCHUBERT – String Quartet No. 10 in E-flat Major D.87
GARETH FARR – String Quartet No. 2 “Mondo Rondo”
MISSY MAZZOLI – Death Valley Junction
BENJAMIN BRITTEN – String Quartet No. 1 in D Major, Op.25
New Zealand String Quartet
Peter Clark, Manu Berkeljon, violins
Gillian Ansell, viola
Lavinia Rae, ‘cello
Prefab Hall, Jessie St, Mt Cook, Wellington
Wednesday 6th May, 2026
Concerts never cease to amaze! – even when the music is familiar, performers can illuminate what one thought was familiar territory and revitalise one’s responses with freshly-wrought approaches and energies. But there’s nothing like hearing live performances of unfamiliar or completely “new” music to one’s own ears, which was my experience at the New Zealand String Quartet’s first “Storytellers” Concert of 2026. It was one that would have given a heart-warming dollop of interest and pleasure to a wide range of concert-going people in Wellington, pushing out the boundaries and widening the vistas normally associated with chamber music and string-quartet-playing to revelatory degrees while still remaining recognisably familiar and viable as an art-form.
I thought it was a pity that Auckland-born and Melbourne-based composer Mika Cornelius could not be with us tonight, here in Wellington, for their work which opened the Quartet’s season of concerts -this was a journey we were taken upon through an absorbing, almost William-Blake-like world of delineation involving the osmotic growth of fungi! – in a phrase, a single mushroom! The exercise of re-enactment of this singular “force-of-nature” process had itself a fascinating kind of multi-media identity in terms of expression and conveyance – beginning with our receptivities as an audience having been appropriately engaged and stimulated by the actual words of the composer about the piece, here spoken by the NZSQ’s General Manager Aslinn Ryan who had welcomed us to the concert, and then introduced the musicians and their four stringed acoustic instruments. It was, in general terms, a scenario whose inescapably “public” ambience seemed, most fascinatingly, to be somewhat at odds initially with what seemed like the essentially miniature, almost microscopic processes required to bring about fruition!
Mika’s words succinctly characterised their work’s depictions, descriptions and delineations of the subject’s components and the latters’ processes for us, movement by movement – firstly there were the “hyphae” – these were “delicate threads that form the foundation of fungi”. How distant, primitive, primordial and raw seemed the sounds made by the players’ instruments, singular and insubstantial, spontaneous by default in their existence, unresponsive to the presence or movement of others. Whatever the scale of things, microscopic, nanoscopic and sub-atomic, or of magnitudes thicker, longer, wider, taller and deeper than one could imagine, these “hyphae” at some point were stimulated by bearers of stimulus which could be described as magical, and given here the universal symbol of “autumn rain”.
The sounds made by the players began to coalesce in almost spontaneous and seemingly random ways – some of the interactions were rhythmic, while others were slow and linear; some connected readily to neighbours, while others were more independent – all rather like a process of adolescence, with variously-growing foci, but somehow these impregnated, coalescent organisms couldn’t help but express a destiny, expressed here by a burst of rhythmic unanimity, a shock to systems whether active or passive! – they became products, results, outcomes!
This newness of identity began to coalesce as spores! – they appeared, whether randomely or purposefully, and with enough self awareness to perform a graceful dance! Tending to pizzicato at first, the sounds gradually “grew into” arco, instrument by instrument, entering a realm of what the composer called “silent eruptions of energy”, with spiralling tones whirling as they took flight! “Is this world our oyster?” became a “Tower-of-Babel-catch-cry”, a buzzing, chattering, babbling refrain as the energies sought their destiny.
A heartfelt, winsome, sighing kind of dance slowly crystallised as the “mycellum”, the “Mecca” of the world of fungi, formed an intricate web – more recitative than melody, and interweaving the individual lines of expression, tremulously draping its sounds all about the textures as the mycellum infiltrated all around and over the earth, forming what the composer called “a Universal Veil”, and validifying at one and the same time the idea of individuality having a collective essence – we ourselves are, like ants, or termites – or, ultimately, fungi! – connected! The music’s lines ended quietly and reflectively, its course showing the way for its infinite progeny to follow….
After this musical version of our somewhat “Magic Schoolbus” adventure we were able to resize, and refocus our existential parameters on a youthful Franz Schubert’s Quartet No.10 in E-flat Major, written when just sixteen years old, and intended for performance by members of the composer’s family – consequently, the work’s become known in some quarters as the “Haushaltung”, (“Household” or “Family” Quartet). The many hours the young musician spent in the “family” quartet gave him a working insight into what each instrument could do. While the individual parts in this quartet (which has the date “1813” on the autograph manuscript) certainly don’t match the excellence or difficulty found in the composer’s later, “great” masterpieces, they are by no means negligible – Schubert would probably have conceived these early works less as aspects of a “personal testament” and more as “things to be effectively performed” – with several notable touches immediately apparent in the NZSQ’s fresh-sounding reading.
The warm initial tones of the work’s opening phrase, with its three conclusive staccato notes brought out, in a single phrase a sense of both balance and humour, with lovely lines and deftly-touched impulses, a young composer’s sense of equilibrium at work, here and in the interplay between lyricism and playfulness as the exposition unfolded. The development and recapitulation sections followed traditional sonata-form practice, maintaining the E-flat major key this time in the latter right through to the movement’s concluding chords – conventional but still impressive!
I straightaway recognised from a previous encounter the perky, leaping-octave opening of the scherzo with its dancing reply – here put second, instead of third, as on my recording (optional?) which followed with its leaping octave briefly taking on the clamour of a concerted chorus at one point, and also cheekily inserting a “false start” grace note on occasions! – and what a beautiful and redolently flowing minor-key“ trio interlude the players delighted us with!
The slow movement’s opening began with forte/piano phrases, here, beautifully and simply delivered, the songful themes then continuing, here-and-there further decorated by repeated-note sequences both together and separately – all serene and unclouded and lullabic. As for the finale, I loved the music’s opening Keystone Cops-like scampering rhythmic trajectories, the players hardly missing a beat when reverting to triplets, and, then, even more cheekily, to the insouciant walking rhythms of the second subject – with Schubert all the while indulging in his already-burgeoning melodic gift of producing hummable tunes! Naturally, with unalloyed glee the players again “pounced” on the “running” rhythms at the reprise of the opening, whirling us through the trajectories to the work’s coda! The final ensembled gestures of the piece here had all the conviviality of a family occasion with a burst of devil-may-care energy just to round things off at the end – so very enjoyable!
I was looking forward immensely to the programme’s next scheduled item, Gareth Farr’s String Quartet No. 2 Mondo Rondo, which I’d heard once before in concert but had much earlier (1999, in fact!) reviewed the work’s first recording by the NZSQ of that time for the Morrison Music Trust. We were amused greatly when the players this evening told us of an occasion somewhere when they’d asked audience members to record and send to the group their reactions to Gareth Farr’s music! – subsequent responses included reports of “accelerated heart rates” and images of “disturbed ants’ nests” – though the zaniest was of “sped-up scenes of a New York train station interspersed with images from a sausage factory!”….whether any further such hallucinatory impressions would emanate from this evening’s audience as a result of tonight’s performance will remain to be seen!
I found myself sufficiently “challenged” by the players’ invitation to audience members to contribute their own impressions of what thoughts and images the music generated, though I remembered at the end of the first movement (subtitled “Mondo Rondo”) that I was supposed to be reviewing the Quartet’s performance, rather than my own recreative reactions to it! Nevertheless, by that movement’s end I had firmly fixed in my mind the pathetic struggles of a puppet on a stage in a half-dressed state trying at once to pull the rest of its clothes on properly while acting out and dancing a story, and getting in a terrible tangle as a result!
It just wouldn’t have done to continue in this vein – so I returned to my “critic” guise for the rest of the work, registering the second “Mumbo Jumbo” movement as a kind of rhythmic-texture loop-cycle, sounds ensnared in the workings of a machine, the tones and timbres characterised by dry pizzicati and instrument-tapping which almost without warning changes completely in character to arco-bowed cries of distress and despair, as if the sounds had suddenly acquired a distinguishable “voice” and were crying to be heard, saved, released, helped to escape – arco, pizzicato and “struck” timbres jostled and tumbled together until the voices gradually relinquished their tones and were distantly silenced, leaving what seemed like a kind of void of impulse and emotion – a feeling no longer able to feel……
Like a kick-started machine bursting into life after a few vain attempts, the rhythm of the third movement “Mambo Rambo” got under way, the ostinato rhythms supporting an exotic, Middle-eastern-like theme with both languid and more energised forms alternated by violin and viola over the incessant trajectories of the second violin and ‘cello, in places rhythmically “crunchy”, in others beset by syncopated “groans” and eerily wandering lines, before the exotic melody returned, enjoying a full throated reprise on all the instruments and then abruptly flung to the winds and disappearing! I couldn’t remember enjoying the piece more than I did here – all so engaging and persuasive, even my very own half-dressed pathetic puppet at the beginning!
After an interval enabled us to get our breath back, we were enjoined to steel ourselves for a visit to “Death Valley Junction”, which was the name of a piece by the American composer Missy Mazzoli, a ten-minute work for string quartet which recreates the ambiences of one of the most renowned places of desolation on Earth – Death Valley, in California’s Mojave Desert. The Junction was “discovered” by Mazzoli on a road trip with her husband in 2004, finding a building that, almost forty years before, in 1967, had been converted from some kind of recreation hall into a hotel-cum-opera house through the efforts of Marta Becket, a former ballet dancer who, inspired by the location of the building developed the idea of establishing a performing arts centre – she herself presented weekly one-woman shows there as well! Mazzoli was, in turn, inspired by the whole concept of what Marta Becket had done, and in 2010 wrote her piece Death Valley Junction, dedicated to Marta Becket herself (the latter died in 2017, aged 92, but her spirit lives on in this music).
In her programme note for the work the composer described the piece as beginning “with a sparse, edgy texture – the harsh desert landscape” and then transforming the ambiences with “a wild and buoyant dance”. From the outset we were made aware of the environment’s notorious heat and aridity by the bleakness and dryness of the instruments sostenuto lines, augmented by the viola’s vivid, and almost in places sinister glissandi, as if representing swooping birds of prey. Gradually the tones took on increased movement and rhythm, glissandi and note-patternings coming together, as if life was signalling its presence, and with movement and energies even suggesting the spirit of song and dance. We were borne, dream-like, through a soundscape suggesting a fusion of co-existence, not through heavy-handed subjugation, but more by determined adaptation of the human spirit to what seemed like a particularly intractable instance of the natural world’s harsh environment. This was particularly characterised by the ‘cello’s on-going dynamic activity, its “human” component in the soundscapes achieving the sense of a small but nevertheless significant instance of survival and achievement.
The programme’s final work was Benjamin Britten’s String Quartet No.1, part of the NZSQ’s tribute to the composer to mark his fiftieth anniversary year. Whether purposed or merely coincidental, the work gave me the impression of seeming to naturally “grow out of” the various soundscapes the NZSQ had already presented us with in the concert – Britten’s writing had elements of the microcosmic growth impulses of Mika Cornelius’s vision, the youthful exuberances of Schubert’s quartet, the madcap energies in places of Gareth Farr’s pulsations and the distinctive feeling for particular “ambiences” demonstrated by Missy Mazzoli’s work. It was the first of his three numbered String Quartets (Britten had written various others as student efforts), and written in 1941 in the United States, the composer and his partner Peter Pears, both pacifists and conscientious objectors, having fled the strictures of the war in Europe. The work was the direct result of a commission by arts patron Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge, and received its premiere in Los Angeles from the Coolidge Quartet, to grateful acclaim from the composer.
In four movements Britten combines elements of classic forms and instances of freer, more spontaneous expression, with marked contrasts of mood both between and in the course of some of the movements. The first movement began quite wondrously with unearthly, top-of-the-range, sostenuto tone-clusters from the upper strings, leaving the ‘cello as if earthbound, looking up and succinctly commenting upon the wonders all about what seemed like the upper reaches of the music’s firmament. Halfway through the movement these sounds died away and the stillness of the visionary mood was suddenly set upon by all the instruments, playing a vigorously-racing, exhilarating, almost “disturbed” kind of triplet-rhythmed, “flailing -in-all-directions” episode, before the pace of things slowed and the music seemed to want to climb back up to the stratospheric heights from whence it began. This process echoed in varied guises until a final “star-cluster, like glow-worms suddenly disturbed in a dark cavern, peremptorily extinguished their light-lines! – superbly-managed musical theatricalities here from the players!
The second movement was a cheekily rhythmic Allegretto, punctuated by abrupt triplet exclamations, and running passages, the mood spontaneous and volatile, almost a kind of danse macabre featuring spasms of energy which dissipated as quickly as they appeared. Not so with the third Andante calmo movement, here as good as its word, with the music seeming in places almost to anticipate the “Moonlight” orchestral interlude in Britten’s yet-to-be-written opera “Peter Grimes”. This was the sequence that ostensibly impressed the American critics who attended the premiere most profoundly, one likening the movement to a kind of “Memorial for a lost world” – the steadily played-out 5/4 rhythms enabled individual instruments to gently rhapsodise in different keys through moments reflecting quiet intensities of both stillness and motion.
The first of a series of scampering arch-like gestures began the final movement, individually and haltingly at first, and then coalescing into partnership in a kind of joyous ferment! Again, the upper string and the ‘cello undertook different pathways through the same scenarios, interchanging turns at intoning soaring lines set next to vigorously dancing figurations, the players achieving exquisite balancings of different themes and counter-rhythms, and delighting us with the tonal, textural and rhythmic differences! And, what a wonderful concerted declamation the ensemble achieved at the end, with trajectories spiralling downwards so heart-stoppingly and spectacularly into the gestures leading to the final chord! Tremendous and resonating stuff for me, as it was also for a number of people I talked with afterwards – a new leaf of exploration turned over for me regarding the fascinating compositional world of Benjamin Britten, but a definite feather in the collective cap of the New Zealand String Quartet!