NZSQ 2026 Storytellers Concert Three
SARA ARAIN – The Internal Eclipse
LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN – String Quartet No.11 in F Minor Op.95
BENJAMIN BRITTEN – String Quartet No. 3 in G Major Op.94
CLAIRE COWAN – Sweet Suite : Hansel & Gretel – highlights for String Quartet
New Zealand String Quartet
Martin Riseley (guest player), Peter Clark – violins
Gillian Ansell – viola
Martin Smith – ‘cello
The Prefab Hall, Jessie St., Mt, Cook,
Wellington
Wednesday, October 28th, 2026
Review for “Middle C” by Peter Mechen
I unfortunately missed the NZSQ’s second concert in this series, thus depriving myself of the chance of hearing all three of Benjamin Britten’s string Quartets “live” this year – the two I did manage to catch were the First (1941) and Third (1975) Quartets, works that spanned much of the composer’s creative life. Britten wrote these works in a century dominated by the string quartets of Bela Bartok and Dmitri Shostakovich, and though he was the least prolific of the three his stand with those by the two other giants regarding their creative fluency and (particularly the two later works) astonishing emotional power.
The NZSQ’s 2026 programme was given the evocative title “Storytellers”, with each of the three concerts presenting, alongside a Britten Quartet, a different kind of exploration of the transformation of stories into musical sounds across the ages. As befitted its title, each programme drew from archetypal sources such as folk tales, different cultural practices and iconic classical pieces, including the distinctive voices of Aotearoa represented by works from our own composers past and present.
On the two occasions I was able to attend, I was enthralled by the variety of the presentations and with the players’ wholehearted responses to the various composers’ depictions in sound of the essences of these representations – while such descriptions of music-making might seem overtly cerebral, one couldn’t help one’s sensibilities falling prey to the enthralling vibrancies by which the different items captivated us. Over the two concerts these included such esoteric explorations as the osmotic growth processes of fungi (a 2025 award-winning work by Auckland-born composer Mika Cornelius entitled “Universal Veil”), and a depiction of human interaction with one of the natural world’s harshest environments (American composer Missy Mazzoli’s 2010 “Death Valley Junction”), contrasted further with an exploratory Beethoven “Middle Period” String Quartet (the Op.94 “Serioso” Quartet), and an ultra-exotic setting for a paradoxical journey of the self from another NZ composer Sara Arain with her 2026 work “The Internal Eclipse”, a piece drawing from an ancient Persian mythical tale.
This third concert began with that last-named work, “The Internal Eclipse”, selected by the Quartet from a number of student entries in a competition at Te Kōkī New Zealand School of Music, Victoria University to write a work for the ensemble to take on tour over the oncoming weeks. The winner was Wellington-based composer Sara Arain, whose Persian, Turkish and Islamic heritage blends together Middle Eastern, European and South Asian cultures. Currently in her fourth year of study with honours papers in composition, her works have already been performed in professional and tertiary-professional concerts such as the 2025 Lilburn Composers’ Competition, where her String Quartet Bridging Silences was a finalist – an extraordinary work in itself, as witness this Lilburn Trust Competition performance (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lE2pN0wapMs&t=77s).
While this piece expressed what the composer herself calls a “fragility of identity”. a kind of dialogue between past and present, Eastern and Western musical languages, and forces such as memory, resistance, acknowledgement and celebration, Sara Arain’s more recent work The Internal Eclipse took us further into her own heritage’s uniqueness, with a sonorously-crafted musical narrative connecting us with an ancient Persian mythical tale of birds in flight whose journey becomes an unexpectedly inward odyssey towards a kind of self-realisation. From the outset I felt the music quietly drawing back a veil and revealing to us a realm where time seemed to almost stand still, It was the viola who then took our attention, its timeless, archetypal-sounding theme suggesting age-old mystery,– here, beautifully illustrated by the instruments’ “fantasia-like” sequences, the folkish-sounding “bent” notes hinting at impulses being “guided” towards destinations that paradoxically seemed like the beginnings rather than new territories. This seemed suggestive of the Persian legend’s persuasive recounting of the birds’ flight into realms of self-discovery – the music had, I felt, this attractive “warmth of recognition” in its trajectories and exchanges.
I couldn’t, on a first-time listen, accurately pinpoint whether the intensified animations represented a continuation of the birds’ legend or marked the of the piece’s next section, to which the composer had given the title “The Observer” – but the music underwent an absorbing intensification at that point, ostinato-like patternings and elaborate fantasy-like renderings, with shifting harmonies creating wondrous colour- and texture- changes, all spontaneously wrought via illumination and fantasy, before coming to a sudden stop with a pizzicato chord. Arain’s idea of “The Observer” being “a self beyond the physical” enabling a more dispassionate self-judgement had an almost Dr.Seussian affinity with the latter’s famous “Watcher of the Bee-Watcher” sequence (in Dr. Seuss’s Did I ever tell You how lucky You are?), where, in Arain’s creative imaginings “The Observer” itself became the observed and could no longer act freely!
In Arain’s music the rebegun music “freely-floating” at first, began to connect with the ostinato passages once again, with the intensities growing and then receding,, and with the listener shifting one’s receptivities between the “prominent’ and the “background” until the distinctions began to blur, the result being a kind of involuntary “liberation” from passing judgement upon the status of the sonic terrain. Again, I wasn’t sure as a listener whether a kind of “crossing the bar” moment was that realisation that “prominent’ and “background” were simply two different ways of viewing the same kind of substance, and that this was the work’s “Crossing”, a fusion of “identity, imagination and creative practice” stemming from the raw composition material, with the composer fashioning what she described as ”…. my Persian, Turkish and Islamic heritage, my connection to Aotearoa New Zealand and the musical legacy of my Turkish great-grandfather Abdülkadir Töre…” (the latter was a significant pedagogic figure in Turkish classical music and its interaction with Western traditions). It all gave the impression of being a huge and varied meditation upon the nature and meaning of sounds, with the viola having the final word, a characteristic phrase tailing into the silences. Afterwards, it was a pleasure to be able to directly acknowledge the composer herself and her work, in tandem with our appreciation of the Quartet’s riveting performance!
After this was more familiar territory, represented by Beethoven’s comparably distinctive “Serioso” String Quartet op.95, a work whose energies and meditations readily conjure up the composer’s conflicts between his ever-expanding creative powers and the disturbing onset of his deafness at this time, a scenario in the throes of which he had also made strenuous but unsuccessful efforts to establish an emotional relationship with at least one woman, the well-documented affair with Therese Malfatti (possibly the object of the composer’s single most famous piano piece Für Elise.
Beethoven’s emotional state at this time was such that the quartet’s composition was accompanied by his firm declaration that it was written “for a small set of connoisseurs and is never to be performed in public”. Its overall character, however,still spoke volumes regarding his emotional state – the quartet’s opening brusque eleven-note unison, followed by vigorous octave leapings from the first violin set the tone for the rest of the movement, the NZSQ players waging the battle on the composer’s behalf with tireless energies and glint-eyed resolve. The group balanced the vigorous outbursts with more heartfelt, though still despairing moments – everything very compressed and to the point, so that it seemed as if almost no time at all had passed before the movement, exhausted by the exertions, drifted towards its brooding close.
We got for a second movement a songful theme given heartfelt expression by the ensemble before turning into a fugue-like display whose intensities led us back to the theme in fascinatingly exploratory ways – not the least of which was the almost spectral “unexpected visitor” chord which announced the scherzo (a deliciously chilling moment! – and I loved the way the ensemble “bounced” those dotted rhythms along beneath the opening theme!). Uncanny, too was the uneasy hymn-like calm which sought to quell the ferocities of the Allegro assai vivace, whose energies remained unimpaired upon its repeated return, to the point of having the last word! The Larghetto expressivo which introduced the finale also didn’t quell Beethoven’s tempestuous mood for long, with everything more agitato than allegretto.And how wonderful was that moment when, for whatever reason, that whole attitude undergoes a kind of “sea-change”, as if the composer has suddenly decided that life can not only be a tragedy to the heart but a comedy to the intellect! – the light, bouncy, comic-opera ending has been called by a commentator “the true Shakespearean touch that provides final confirmation regarding the truth of the rest!”
Interestingly, the concert’s second half trajectories, in a strange way, almost “mirrored” the final movement of the “Serioso” Quartet, beginning as it did with Benjamin Britten’s heartfelt Third String Quartet, and concluding with New Zealand composer Claire Cowan’s diametrically-counterweighted suite of dances, both energetic and piquant, from her ballet “Hansel and Gretel” – as with all storytellings, a soupcon of light serves to better define the extent of the darkness!
Britten wrote this Quartet at the same time he was finishing the composition drafts of his final opera “Death in Venice” – his friend Hans Keller had suggested that chamber music might be less taxing to write than a full orchestral manuscript, and Britten had long promised Keller he would return to the string quartet medium. The Amadeus Quartet, to whom Britten had promised the work, gave the composer a private performance of the finished Quartet in September 1975 – however he did not live to hear the quartet give the work’s first public performance in December of that year at Snape Maltings.
The first of the five movements, true to its subtitle “Duets” explored different pairings of quartet voices, with the lines closely entwined, the instrument pairs nudging one another gently at first, and then in more adversarial ways – the cello’s vigorous interaction with the viola, for instance was punctuated by jagged sforzandi from the violins, with the “pairs” alternating the different modes. The wandering, exploratory quality returned, the players “connecting” their phrases gratefully, partnering each other differently for various sequences, and all briefly coming together for a final questioning phrase.
The second movement, “Ostinato) began excitingly with a jaggedly insistent repeated 4-note phrase driving the music forward, and continuing to “haunt” its overall momentums. until relief descended upon the ambiences in the form of beautiful open-air chordings and scented phrases, which melted into the textures. Back came the vigorous ostinato for a final fling! – though the more mellifluous textures and ambiences re-emerged at the end.
The solo violin plsyed a “voice in the wilderness” role in the third movement, with the cello its circumspect companion, and the viola contributing a passing phrase or two, which the second violin extended into a beautiful counter-melody – all this seemed more like solemn ritual than nature at first, until a quixotic outburst of bright and animated impulses blossomed like birdsong! – the music ‘s almost “escapist” mode suggested something of a fairy-tale world, one whose manifestations were as short-lived as they were enchanting! – what a change with the fourth-movement “Burlesque”, whose initial rough-hewn, buffoon-like accents suddenly took on a semi-skeletal aspect, a “dance macabre”, with the viola playing startling “above the bridge” phrases, and the others insistently rustic to the end!
Another sea-change accompanied the final movement,”La Serenissima”, with its reference to Venice, the sounds Aeolian-harp-like, with “water-droplet” viola pizzicato, and cello recitative containing echoes of the opera “Death in Venice” Britten had just completed, leading up to the movement’s Passacaglia, which used the key of E Major, which had frequently accompanied the opera’s main character Aeschenbach’s music in the opera. The intensities grew as the players reiterated the Passacaglia melody (based on the melody Britten had himself heard when in Venice), the music becoming almost celebratory at its climax, before slowly dying away, the solo violin playing the Passacaglia theme while the rest murmured the harmonies, eventually “dissolving” their tones into the silences following the work’s final chord – Britten’s comment was simply – “I wanted the work to end with a question”.
Auckland composer Claire Cowan’s Suite of Dances from her highly successful full-length ballet “Hansel and Gretel” consisted of three movements which she formed into a “Sweet Suite” – the first of these, from Act One of the ballet, was “King and Queen Fairy Tango”, from the scene in the First Act where Hansel and Gretel are lost in the woods but are protected by the Sandman who scatters them with magic sleep-dust, bringing out the fairies to dance beneath the moon – the King and Queen enter and dance a tango as the children sleep, the music begun by the solo cello, with the other players clapping their hands before joining in with the sultry rhythms, And, at the end, there was a wonderfully “splurgy” final chord!
Next came “The Food People”, with its wonderfully deep-and-drowsy opening, featuring gorgeous drooping glissandi as the children help themselves to the witch’s food! But suddenly, the music itself “steps out” and the food itself dances a digestively-syncopated waltz, life-sized ice-cream figures “melting into” and then “jamming up” the rhythms! And more was to come, with the Witch herself concocting a grotesque meal – “The Witch’s Baking-Charleston” – the dance itself skeletal and bone-dry, eye glinting, and then accelerating into a madcap galop – lots of bows bouncing on the strings, and the spontaneous-sounding improvisatory lines skidding about atop the trajectories! – unashamedly silent-movie stuff, with the dance adding to the era’s characteristic abandonment to pleasure – and hang the consequences! We heartily consumed it all and were consumed ourselves – storytelling that simply couldn’t be beat! – and all of it such a delicious pleasure!