Tag: chamber music

Trio Obscura – singular tones and timbres bringing to life old and new music with verve and sensitivity

Posted on by Peter Mechen

 

TRIO OBSCURA
Bede Hanley (oboe), Robert Ashworth (viola), Sarah Watkins (piano)

AUGUST KLUGHARDT (1849-1902)
“Schilflieder” (Songs of the Reeds) – Five Fantasy Pieces   (1872)

ALYSSA MORRIS (1984- )
“The Big Questions” (2024)
1. Who am I?  2. What is this Crazy Thing called Life? 3. How is it Possible?  4. What Comes Next?

CHARLES MARTIN LOEFFLER (1861-1935)
Two Rhapsodies for Oboe, Viola and Piano (1901)
1. Lento (un poco andante ) – L’etang (“The Pool”)
2, Un poco maestoso  (Andante) – La Cornemuse (“The Bagpipe”)

JANET JENNINGS  (1957- )
Five Emotional States (2025)
1.Anxiety   2.Melancholy   3.Anger  4.Relief  5.Exhilaration

Wellington Chamber Music Sunday Concerts
St.Andrew’s-on-The-Terrace, Wellington
Sunday 10th May, 2026

Trio Obscura’s name reminded me somewhat of TS Eliot’s wonderfully idiosyncratic poem “The Naming of Cats”, in which the poet describes a cat’s reverie when contemplating “…his ineffable, effable, effanineffable, deep and inscrutable, singular name”.  Of course, there’s no such comparable mystery regarding “The Naming of The Trio” (its title is sufficiently and resonantly suggestive!), but there’s certainly a kind of singularity in the actual combination of “sounds” here, one which was sported blithely and cheerily by this combination of musicians!

I’d not heard of two of the four composers on today’s programme, the first of whom was August Klughardt, born in Köthen, Germany, in 1849, and who grew up during a time of turmoil in music between conservatives who held to classicism and its traditions and the progressives who wanted to explore new modes of expression. From an early age he worked at developing his performing as well as composing skills, first as a pianist and then as a conductor, in which capacity when working at the Ducal Court in Weimar he encountered Franz Liszt, who exerted a profound impression upon him, introducing him to Richard Wagner and the “New German School” of creativity (Klughardt was to conduct Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen at the court in Dessau in later years). His own compositions, however, reflected a kind of eclectic attitude to the music of the times, taking elements from both traditional and progressive influences. Today his music – symphonies, concertos, operas, vocal and chamber music – is hardly known, though the latter is beginning to receive increased attention, with the most obvious influence in his work (here, for example) being that of Schumann  (I recently read a review of Klughardt’s 1884 Piano Quintet, which was obviously inspired by Schumann’s work in the same genre).

Today’s work “Schilflieder” (Song of the Reeds) took the form of five “Fantasy Pieces”, inspired by the poetry of Nikolaus Lenau (1802-50), whose work also inspired music by Franz Liszt and Richard Strauss. This particular set of verses devotes a separate stanza to the different moods of a wanderer’s day and evening in a forest and by a pond.  “Schilflkieder” was written in 1872 and dedicated by Klughardt to Liszt himself – and actually achieved well-deserved attention for the remainder of the composer’s lifetime.  Interestingly, Klughardt noted in the score that the oboe part could be played if necessary by the violin, a starkly practical, if somewhat radical-sounding adjustment to a sound-world!

The first piece, titled “The sun is sinking over there”, was begun by Sarah Watkins’ piano solo as a sombre preparatory.  The music continued its melancholy course on Bede Hanley’s oboe, until Robert Ashworth’s viola’s entry brought a contrastingly flowing, more expressive character to the mood, seeming to have cheered the oboe up considerably when it re-entered. In this mood of appeasement the instruments ended the piece quietly together. With the following “Darkness falls, the clouds are flying”, I was straightaway taken into what seemed a Schumannesque world = the music had that same earnestly-toned sense of striving (the music marked “impassioned”), with, of course the viola’s sombre tones adding to that so-distinctive ambience! With the following, and so delectably, in places, Brahmsian  “Along a secret path”  I found myself straining to hear the viola at first, against the piano, (the composer’s rather than the player’s fault, here!) wanting more body of tone to make the lines sing. The oboe had no difficulty in this regard, even despite the florid nature of the piano writing, but the viola’s line I thought too subdued in places for the material.,

As for the fiery “Sunset” which followed, it sounded as if we were on board Wagner’s Dutchman’s ship battling the tempests – Sarah Watkins’ piano-playing conjured up a veritable storm through which the oboe piped strenuously and heroically, except that the viola was for the most part, to my ears, lost, swamped in the torrents of sound! Most thankfully, with the “sehr ruhig” of the final piece “On the pond, the motionless one”, we heard both exquisite solo lines and beautiful duetting between oboe and viola, suggesting perhaps moonlight on the tranquil waters after the storm, the viola spaciously raising its voice and singing its melodic traceries. The piano still generated energies aplenty with triumphant-sounding chords in places, but was content to accompany its companions over the work’s serenely lyrical close.

Another name new to me was Alyssa Morris (b.1984), an American composer whose style was described in the programme as “approachable, flashy and beautiful” – the title of her 2024 work “The Big Questions” poses the idea of confronting our very existence, pondering imponderables such as “Who am I?” / “What is this crazy thing called Life?”/ “How is it Possible?” / “What comes next?”.  Reasoning that there are as many potentialities and possibilities as there are humans on this planet capable of flooding one’s sensibilities with uniquely-conceived minutae potentially delivering as much confusion as enlightenment (that sentence will do for a starter!), I strained forwards in my seat hoping to discern via the infintinesimal/infinite action of sound-impulses upon my primed sensibilities a true sense of awareness illuminating my inner being. I wasn’t sure whether the result would be any different to my listening to a favourite piece of music at any given moment of out-of-the-ordinary receptivity – but I counted myself at that particular moment as “ready for anything”.

It struck me that the composer was indulging in a kind of “sleight-of-hand” in giving us the existential titles I’ve already quoted, their “idea” actually containing the seeds of execution more than the actual sounds that followed. “Who am I?”, for example, began with a viola’s single note over which oboe and piano elaborated, recitative-style in a series of “statements” – the piano floridly invited the oboe and viola to similarly elaborate their lines. The music became very “Big American Musical” or “Big Screen”,r even “Big Country”, encouraged by fulsome instrumental tones. A by-product of these fulsome amplifications was that I felt “engaged “ with ideas while losing any specific sense of any uniquely distinctive and definitive state – was it me in this “Who am I?” moment, or was I actually experiencing with this “the craziness of the thing called Life?”

There were “clues” as to what was happening – conversational exchanges between the three instruments punctuated by crazily sassy detailings such as the viola’s sudden downward-plunging glissando, followed by pizzicato-like excuses for such off-the-wall spontaneities! Then there’s a waltz-rhythm, with the three players “bending the trajectories” in Salvador-Dali-like ways, until the famously flaccid structures raised themselves up with an effort and brought off a surprisingly “cutsie” gesture of farewell!

By this time, the question of “What comes next?” that we felt “ready for” had been gazumphed in itself so many times by the music itself we felt ready for anything! A piano solo, gesturing and ruminative, answered by the viola and echoed by the oboe (where he/she goes, we go! was almost sentimentally refrained by the ensemble) – until there was definitely a sense of something impending – was this, perhaps “The Next?” – the piano plunged into  a running, surging accompaniment-like figure which had left its soloist at the starting post by accident! – but which oboe and viola catch up hurriedly! The music became a full-scale song, almost Negro-spiritual-like in manner! The instruments fulsomely decorated their lines as if approaching a kind of climax! Suddenly, everything stopped! – could this be “an end”?  Was there actually such a thing?  I remember when a small boy thinking “When the spaceship reaches the so-called “end of space”, what’s behind that end-wall? – there’s still more space!” Similarly, was this an ending? – or was there simply no end? Was this “What comes Next?” – will there be “no end” of “What comes next?”… except continued (and gorgeous!) soft playing?  The music drifts into space – the oboe and violin hold their notes……the piano softly elaborates…..and finishes!

We needed a half-time! – the sense of “Where am I?” needed some familiar, reassuring sign-posting  – also, I was uncomfortably aware of having perhaps too readily indulged in fancy throughout Alyssa Morris’s essentially “escapist” piece. I needed something more earthily “real” once again, upon which to plant my feet. Interestingly,  the composer Charles Martin Loeffler (1861-1935) whose music was next on the programme  was to supply me with a soupcon of empathy in this respect – Loeffler was described by violist Robert Ashworth in his introduction as “a German man trying to be French”! This was a reference to the composer’s reluctance to acknowledge his actual birthplace (Schonëberg, Berlin), and his somewhat “displaced” sense of upbringing, as he spent most of his life claiming his birthplace was in the Alsace region, which famously borders France, Germany and Switzerland! – (in fact a number of references I checked continue to maintain his claim that he was born in the French Alsacs region!)

Embarking on a career that took him from his birthplace in Germany to the United States via France, Russia, Hungary and Switzerland, the young Loeffler studied the violin in Berlin with Joseph Joachim and then composition with Ernest Giuiraud in Paris, playing in various French orchestras. After his move to the United States in 1881 he joined the Boston Symphony, with whom he performed as assistant concertmaster until resigning from the orchestra to devote his energies to composition. He’s known today as a skilled, highly fastidious and self-critical composer, belonging to no “school”, but combining his earlier French influences and sensibilities with his later “New World” experiences . In February 1931 Olin Downes, Music Critic of the New York Times, wrote in a seventieth birthday tribute to the composer, that Loeffler was “one of the representative musicians of an age”, but concluded that “his expression of that age has come from within, and not, as an imitation of fads and shibboleths of the hour, from outside.”

This work was originally planned as a set of Three Rhapsodies in 1898, but was extensively revised by Loeffler after the tragic death of the dedicatee – one of the pieces was shelved, and the two remaining works were rescored during 1901 for oboe, with viola and piano The first of these Rhapsodies became a memorial for the composer’s deceased colleague. Consequently, the piece began darkly, with the viola answering the piano’s first sombre notes strongly and whole-heartedly, more than matching the oboe’s plaintive tones, the viola here far more assertively-voiced than was the case with the Klughardt work. The style recalled the late-Romanticism of Ernest Chausson, evident in the “longing” nature of the phrases for all of the instruments, the oboe delivering a particularly beautiful solo episode at one point over the piano’s rippling phrases. A darker passage for both instruments resulted in recitative-like passages suddenly seeming to break into a dance , almost like the “friss” which follows a “lassu” in the Hungarian Rhapsodies of Liszt, the music readily ebbing and flowing across the instrumental timbres, until the sombre mood suddenly returned, the viola again richly-and darkly-toned against the plaintive oboe and  piano, with the music hauntingly drifting between minor and major harmonies as the voices died away.

The Second Rhapsody (subtitled “The Bagpipe”) actually began as if it were a Liszt Rhapsody, with a florid piano passage, but then wistfully morphed into a kind of plaintive Bartokian folk-song – perhaps the bagpiper’s tune? Its repetition was suitably lump-in-the throat in its wistfulness – oboe and viola responded most rhapsodically, the “bagpipe” theme by turns lively and ruminative, either goading its listeners into dancing-mode or regaling listeners with a story. We felt regaled by story-telling tones and gestures from each of the instruments, feeling as if the listeners had “heard this tale before” and were reliving its characterisations and narrative lines! And what a particular joy it was to hear the viola sing so sonorously, next to its companions!  After oboe and viola had finished their near-operatic “duet” with the piano’s sterling guidance, the three instruments engaged in a brief, gestural “are we all here, still?” exchange before letting the tones of the discursive tales find their rest.

For those who felt that the Loeffler work was much too earnest a response to those “Big Questions” posed by Alyssa Morris earlier in the afternoon, an alternative, “thistledown-on-the-wind”-like  rejoiner to “Life And Its Problems” was posed by Waikato composer Janet Jennings (whose work “Voices of Women” I’ve previously reviewed on “Middle C” – see https://middle-c.org/2020/09/16161/ )  This work – “Five Emotional States”  – is described in a programme note by its composer as “not to be taken seriously”, a comment that on a certain level of engagement makes plenty of good sense, but may simultaneously “beg the question” of emotional health in general for those who look beyond the work’s wondrously rollicking capacities for entertainment and into the real world of 2026 New Zealand, where people of all ages and circumstances are often forced against their will into situations where these states are all too palpably experienced. I’m not saying the work shouldn’t have been written – rather the opposite! Perhaps, though, it needs, in my opinion, not to be trivialised.

Having gotten that concern “off my chest”, may I say that the experience itself was for me an absolute riot, a palpable and resonating amalgam of delight and disturbance whose sequences I could all too readily recognise as having a degree of self-ownership of feelings generated by both inward and outer tensions – it also made me aware of the vital role that hope has to play amidst such experiences, given expression here in the section called “Relief”, and without which for me would have been akin to a horrifying, inwardly Faustian prospect of eternal damnation! Am I myself thus guilty of doing what the composer urged her audiences not to do?  I was, all above concerns considered, ultimately delighted by the experience – and, to the performers, Sarah Watkins, Robert Ashworth and Bede Hanley, I dips my lid in boundless appreciation!

Tales of the New Zealand String Quartet 2026

Posted on by Peter Mechen

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!

Echoes of woodland scenes rubbing shoulders with companionable coffee-houses! – an echt-Viennese musical lunchtime experience for Wellingtonians at St. Andrew’s-on-the-Terrace!

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Christine Wang (violin), Beth Chen (piano), and Sebastian Dunn (horn)

EUGÈNE BOZZA (1905-1991) – En Forêt (In the Forest) Op.40
Sebastian Dunn (horn), Beth Chen (piano)

FRITZ KREISLER (1875-1962) – Schön Rosmarin (Old Viennese Dance No. 3)
Christine Wang (violin), Beth Chen (piano)

JOHANNES BRAHMS  (1833-1897) – Trio for Horn, Violin and Piano in E-flat Major Op.40
Christine Wang (violin), Sebastian Dunn (horn), Beth Chen (piano)

St Andrew’s-on-The-Terrace, Wellington
Wednesday, April 29th, 2026

Every now and then in a concert one encounters music one has never before heard, or even heard of, and sometimes even whose composer has a name one doesn’t know. On certain occasions audiences sit primly and attentively and at the end applaud, congratulating the composer(s) and the musicians, and of course, one another upon according the piece or pieces due attention. But on once-in-a-blue-moon occasions such hitherto unknown music can unexpectedly generate an instant impact akin to a real frisson of excitement, one which lingers on in the memory for ages afterwards. It’s happened to me a few times over my years of concert-going experience – the latest being my attendance at a recent St Andrew’s-on-The Terrace concert featuring three outstanding musicians – Sebastian Dunn, horn, Christine Wang, violin, and Beth Chen, piano.

To be accurate, the truly “instant combustion” fireworks took place most markedly during the concert’s first item, featuring horn player Sebastian Dunn and pianist Beth Chen in a vivid presentation of an ear-opening horn-and-piano piece by French composer, Eugène Bozza (1905-1991). This was En forêt  (In the Forest), a piece written in 1941 as an entrance exam piece for the Conservatoire de Paris, and one regarded ever since as embodying the entire technical and expressive capabilities of the French horn. The piece depicted a hunting party in a forest, the writing combining different horn-playing techniques with an impressionistic piano accompaniment. Both  Sebastian Dunn and Beth Chen revelled in their concerted evocations of the hunt and their individual depictions of various scenes and moods throughout – a particularly atmospheric feature was the horn’s magical use of call and distanced (or muted) respondings. The visceral impact of the piece and its performance almost literally “brought the house down” at the conclusion, so evocative was the playing of both musicians throughout in terms of recreating presence and distance, activity and reflection.

After these somewhat “larger-than-life” exertions, violinist Christine Wang next took the platform with Beth Chen to give us “something completely different” – a most charming and nostalgia-soaked piece titled Schön Rosemarin – Old Viennese Dance No.3, by Fritz Kreisler. Before the piece was even halfway though, the winsome charm and delicacy of the players’ violin and piano strains had taken us far away from the forests and the hunters, and was instead enabling us to “drink in” the ambience of the Viennese coffee-house with its traditional “Atmosphäre von Gemütlichkeit”. Fritz Kreisler, besides having been, of course, a renowned virtuoso violinist, was also a composer, but he preferred to publish some of his music under an assumed name so as to give the pieces the chance to be judged by their own merits and not by his “virtuoso violinist’s” reputation. By comparison with Sebastian Dunn’s riveting display of “virtuoso roar” with HIS instrument, violinist Christine Wang seemed to me to catch the completely different kind of “olde-worldly” ambience of the Kreisler piece perfectly, as did Beth Chen’s equally delightful pianistic identification with the spirit of the music.

These seemingly far-flung performing aureoles and contrasts in delivery then magically came together for the programme’s third item, Johannes Brahms’s Horn Trio in E-flat Major. In his introduction to the piece Sebastian Dunn talked about the composer’s preference for the “natural” (i.e. “valveless) horn over the more modern version.  Obviously the “Waldhorn” as it was known, had nostalgic connections for Brahms (his father had taught him as a child to play the instrument) besides what the composer specifically referred to as the horn’s more “natural” characteristics, its intrinsic tonal shadings and generally “softer” sound. Dunn assured us that he would do his best in this performance to compensate for his own “modern” instrument’s relative “brashness”!

This work was written in 1865, and probably inspired chiefly by the death of the composer’s mother earlier that same year. As with Brahms, its genesis wasn’t perhaps entirely straightforward, as befitted his generally enigmatic response to various influences regarding his music.  The Trio’s somewhat changeable moods across its four-movement span have prompted various other conjectures regarding sources of inspiration – besides recalling his mother singing the folksong “Dort in den Weide steht ein Haus” (There among the willows stands a house) as influencing part of the Adagio Mesto slow movement, Brahms hinted at another, more mischievous song in the work’s finale, “Es soll sich ja keiner mit der Liebe abgeben” (No-one should have anything to do with love), one which ably suited his ongoing “confirmed bachelor” status. As with any piece of music its creative motivations, whether conscious or otherwise, invariably reflect a veritable jigsaw of influences.

Brahms’s combination of violin, piano and horn was innovative at the time, but has since inspired a number of other works, most obviously (and perhaps, surprisingly) György Ligeti’s 1982 work Hommage à Brahms. Here, the performance of the “original” generously brought out all of the work’s inherent qualities, the opening Andante movement enjoying its relative freedom as the only “sonata-ish” work of Brahms’ to pay little heed to sonata form! – this was more of a rondo-patterned melancholy main theme with a livelier contrasting sequence, the two sections alternating and  subtly blending gestures from one another’s material into a beautiful coda.

The second movement was a dancing Scherzo begun by the piano, and juxtaposing a leaping opening theme with occasional syncopated shouts of consenting glee, catapaulting the trajectories through to the resonantly sombre Trio, after which the Scherzo’s return restored the music’s high spirits. Came the Adagio mesto slow movement, a funereal introduction by the piano heralding a scenario of sorrowful lament, violin and horn almost weeping, it seemed, as the piano moved the cortege forwards – there appeared no respite until the movement’s end, despite an occasional “lifting up” of the melodic line, only to be brought down to earth again under the weight of emotion and gradually dissolving into the mists of gloom….

What a transformation the music then underwent with the finale’s delicious bubbling-up of energies from within!  – with rompings and frolickings spreading like wildfire through the music’s textures! Christine Wang’s violinistic brilliance, by now fully come into its own, and Beth Chen’s vigorous “foundation-rock” piano-tones were the constant “movers and shakers” of the music throughout. Interestingly, (and ironically), I’ve always felt Brahms’ writing for the horn never fully conveyed the out-and-out exhilarations of the “Waldhorn” world, one made so manifest by the Bozza piece we heard at the concert’s beginning – though, of course Sebastian Dunn’s skilfully-reproduced rumbustions during the Brahms work were sufficiently ebullient in certain places to make the instrument’s presence felt, and especially towards the piece’s end!

A group of us, amid plenty of excited babble, managed to make our way across the Terrace to a coffee-shop afterwards, where we were able to reflect anew (and not by any means for the first time!) upon our good fortune at having a lunchtime concert series in the city to attend which featured such resoundingly memorable musical treasures delivered via absolutely first-class performances!

 

 

 

 

 

Bright, Capricious and Colourful – Arohanui Strings’ Benefit Concert at Roseneath, Wellington ’s “Long Hall”

Posted on by Peter Mechen

MORITZ MOSZKOWSKI – Allegro Energico (from “Suite in C Minor Op. 71)
The Treble-Makers – Whitney Wu  and Izabela Ibanez, violins, (Arohanui Strings)
Amelia Liu, piano, (Queen Margaret College, Wellington)
JS BACH – Three Dances (Bouree – Loure – Courante) from French Suite in G Major BWV 816
(arr. Pohl/Gjelsten)
Helene Pohl, violin, Rolf Gjelsten, ’cello
ALBERT ROUSSEL – Trio for Flute, Viola and ‘Cello (1929)
Bridget Douglas, flute, NIcholas Hancox, viola, Rolf Gjelsten ‘cello
WOLFGANG MOZART – Quartet for Flute, Violin, Viola and ‘Cello K.298
Bridget Douglas, flute, Helene Pohl, violin, Nicholas Hancox, viola, Rolf Gjelsten, ‘cello

The Long Hall, Point Jerningham, Roseneath. Wellington
Saturday 25th April, 2026

One of the more delightful aspects of concert-going is the singular pleasure of encountering “new music” on the programme – by “new”, I mean in this instance music that one has never before encountered, rather than something “contemporary”. –  from this twenty-first century viewpoint the latter term has for many of us seen works thus described undergo the inevitable ageing process!

Not that I can remember the music of Polish/German pianist and composer Moritz Moszkowski (1854-1925) ever sounding “contemporary”, though what we heard today from the output of French composer Albert Roussel (1869-1937) was certainly rather more acerbic and  “modern-sounding ” than that of either Moszkowski or the music of Russian composer Reinhold Glière (1875-1956), the third of the trio of nineteenth/twentieth-century names accompanying that of JS Bach’s and Mozart’s on the programme I heard today at Roseneath’s “The Long Hall”.

Helene Pohl’s and Rolf Gjelsten’s continued espousal of their Pot-Pourri Chamber Ensemble activities brought together a brilliant and wholehearted array of talents for today’s concert, featuring flutist Bridget Douglas and violist Nicholas Hancox, as well as an inspiring trio of young musicians, two of whom, violinists  Whitney Wu and Izabella Ibanez play in the inspirational group Arohanui Strings, and a third, pianist Amelia Liu, a competition winner from Queen Margaret College in Wellington. The last-named occasioned the bringing out of an upright piano for the Moszkowski work, which was a “first” for this listener at the Long Hall – a rare treat! (I loved the name this Trio had concocted and made reference to in the programme, for our pleasure! – “The Treble-Makers”!)

I came to this concert largely uninitiated as far as the music by the three aforementioned era-spanning composers was concerned – in fact, the only music by Moszkowski I had previously heard was a set of “Spanish Dances Op.12” beloved by audiophiles due to a justly-famous early stereo (late 1950s) recording of the same, sporting the title “Espana”. (Elsewhere, as well, there’s definitely a highly-regarded piano concerto I’ve yet to catch up with!) Though only the first movement, Allegro  energico, of a “Suite in G Minor Op. 71” was played by the Trio, the group caught the “striving melancholy” of the violins’ firmly-centred descending phrases, in both minor and major keys, deftly supported by the piano when alternating heartfelt descending melodic lines with tumbling rhythmic surges, and creating infectious excitement by building the intensities leading to a spiritedly accelerated coda – what fun! – and what a joy to experience such youthful exuberance in triplicate!

Next came three dances taken from one of JS Bach’s keyboard works, a French Suite in G Major, and transcribed here for violin and ‘cello – Helene Pohl described the transcription of this music in the progrqmme as “working beautifully for string duo”, with counterpoints “to be savoured”! First came a spirited and joyous Boureé, the violin singing the melody and the ‘cello keeping things moving with a running counterpoint, the latter seemingly tempted at various cadences to follow the violin canonically, but after a few imitative notes skipping back into dance-mode! After this came the Loure (a languid, waltz-like dance) with its opening phrase imitative between the instruments before the ‘cello took up the rhythmic trajectories, enjoying, in the second sequence, some deliciously insouciant accompanying gestures. Finally, we heard the Courante, the music again imitative between the instruments at first, before the second part featured the ‘cello dancing in attendance of the violin, the latter picking up the cello’s figurations in response – gorgeously interactive!

We then got what was for me another rarity, four pieces from Reinhold Glière’s Eight Duets for Violin and ‘Cello, Op. 39. I’d actually heard more of Glière’s music than of Moszkowski’s or of Roussel’s, having encountered probably his most well-known piece from a Soviet-style ballet, “The Red Poppy”, a boisterous, crowd-pleasing romp called  the “Russian Sailors’ Dance”.  I’d also heard, more momentously, the most famous of his three symphonies –  an epic 80-minute work subtitled “Ilya Muromets” celebrating the adventures and death of a mythological Russian “Bogatyr” hero based on the lives of several such personae from different epochs of Russian history – strong stuff for a beginner-listener to encounter, back in my College years, but with startling sequences that still resonate in the memory, however dimly. Another notable claim to fame of Gliere’s was his tutorship of the youthful Serge Prokofiev, beginning lessons in 1902 when the latter was just ten years old and continuing until Prokofiev was accepted into the St.Petersburg Conservatory as a student at the age of thirteen.

Much of Glière’s output is unexplored, including a not inconsiderable amount of chamber and instrumental works (though he caused a posthumous ripple of interest in his music when soprano Joan Sutherland enterprisingly recorded in the 1970s a “Concerto for coloratura soprano and orchestra”). The Four Duets we heard were taken from his Op.39, written in 1909. The Prelude, beginning the set, was practically a “tuning-up” exercise, with the violin holding a single note and the ‘cello intoning a wistful, repeated phrase, before the instruments “swopped” roles – a simple, sombre, but resonantly effective piece. The Berceuse which followed featured a gorgeous violin melody in tandem with the cello’s  attendant repeated rising phrase – simply enchanting!   Then came the Intermezzo, a melancholy Schumannesque melody with a “rocking” motion, reminiscent of parts of Schumann’s Kinderscenen. Interestingly, the Gavotte that followed seemed to jump into a harmonically different dance-floor world altogether, with an engaging middle section, very “pesante” themes from the violin and drone-sounds from the ‘cello, then taking us back for something of an abrupt farewell to the dance and its mercurial world.

Our two aforementioned additional players joined the ensemble after a short break – one of them, violist Nicholas Hancox, was of course a stalwart of the ensemble at many of last year’s concerts at the hall and was thus welcomed like an old friend! But we felt especially honoured to have with us for the second half flutist Bridget Douglas, well-known for her participation in many memorable NZSO concerts as a principal section leader, and also in numerous chamber performances in the Wellington region. These players brought with them more (for me)  relatively unfamiliar music, a Trio for flute, viola and ‘cello by Albert Roussel, a name I knew only through a recording I’d purchased  long ago of a ballet of his with the name Le Festin de l’araignée (“The Spider’s Feast”), a work filled with gorgeous impressionistic sounds buoyed along by insinuating rhythms and extremely wry characterisations.

This Trio, written in 1929, I thought an extraordinary piece! – it promised something similar to the ballet at its outset, the Allegro featuring  buoyant rhythms dancing through open-air ambiences, and suggesting all nature at play, despite the occasional tinges of melancholy. The flute enjoined its companions more readily to share its bright-and-breezy manner, and viola and ‘cello did occasionally “buck themselves up”  with spirited surges of march-rhythm merriment and even a patch of  “triplet-flavoured bonhomie” towards the movement’s end that helped keep us all smiling!

But “O, mon Dieu!”  – the Andante was introduced by a sombre viola melody with an equally rueful arpeggiated ‘cello accompaniment, to which the flute added a kind of would-be-but-on-another-day-consoling melody – that done the viola and ‘cello had an exceedingly gloomy duet sequence (“those poor dears!”), one which the ‘cello tried next to “cheer up”, without success! The flute also persisted but without much joy (“What on earth could be the matter?” I wanted to ask the composer’s shade……). A sustained note seemed to be the only floating Pooh-stick the players could find to grasp and hold onto, and wait for the end!  Goodness! – the silence was golden!

And then, wonder of wonders, the music’s first-movement cheerfulness returned for the finale! The ‘cello had stepwise pizzicati, the viola a dancing figure and the flute a perky, bright-faced tune! Such was the camaraderie, the players sped up the trajectories as the blood started to flow more quickly, bringing our listeners’ hearts into our mouths with the relief of it all! – we even had a bit of unbridled stamping sailors’ dance excitement at one point! The movement’s opening returned with even more insouciance, bringing back the sailors for a bit more hi-jinks stamping – and then we heard an eerie passage featuring extraordinary harmonics-like texturings from the strings and near-lullabic tones from the flute.  However, the players seemed to then pick up on the composer’s “homeward bound” urgings, as they responded stepwise to the music’s ever-growing trajectories,  some helter-skelter, almost “silent movie’  soundtrack-scamperings with more “sailors’ dance” roisterings, leading to a concerted “knees-up-like” final flourish! Golly! – Did we dream him? –  or did Roussel dream us? – I ask myself as I write these wry remembrances of what we heard!

With the Mozart Flute Quartet K.298 (a later work than the K-number suggests) which followed, we were presented with a different kind of wryness, firstly in the form of the widespread supposition that the composer didn’t really CARE for the flute despite writing various works for the instrument, one set against a counter-argument that it was actually the person who COMMISSIONED the works for the instrument that Mozart really abhorred! This having been said, we then learned that Mozart had possibly written this particular work for himself, purely for pleasure!

Whatever the case, the music was simply divine – a lovely opening, half-hymn, half popular ditty, featured the flute carrying the melody. This was actually a ”theme and variations” movement, with Bridget Douglas “dancing”  her instrument through the ensuing moments of sheer contrapuntal enjoyment, and ringing the changes in the other variations, the second a running counterpoint for the violin against long-held flute notes, the third a florid version of the theme from the viola (just superb!) with “ambient” comments from the others, and the last a return by the flute to the theme with the ‘cello supplying the knowingly droll trajectories!

The second movement, Menuetto, jumped into D Major, with the flute leading a sprightly, upwardly  soaring opening harmonised phrase striding out confidently, then impishly dancing about in a single variation of the theme in a middle section. Back came the opening key for the last movement with gentle finality, the melody tossed about the instruments with an art-that-conceals-art kind of spontaneity, so that we got the composer’s intention of a group of friends making music for the sheer pleasure of doing so, a pleasure we in the audience felt, in such company, pleased and privileged to share and similarly enjoy.

Saxophone opening up the chamber vistas – Simon Brew with the Amici Ensemble at St.Andrew’s

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Wellington Chamber Music Series 2026 – Simon Brew with the Amici Ensemble

RUSSELL PETERSON (b.1969) – Quintet for alto saxophone and strings 2003
MAX RICHTER  (b.1966) – On the Nature of Daylight (2004)
ELLEN TAAFFE ZWILICH (b.1939) – Quintet for Saxophone and Strings
WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART (1756-1791) – String Quartet in F Major K.590
ASTOR PIAZZOLLA (1921-1992) Winter and Spring from The Four Seasons of Buenos Aires (arr. Mary Osborn)

Amici Ensemble (Saxophone Quintet)
Donald Armstrong (violin), Anna van der Zee  (violin), Nicholas Hancox (viola), Andrew Joyce (‘cello), Simon Brew (saxophone)

St.Andrews-on-The-Terrace
Sunday, 12th April 2026

The saxophone as a musical instrument has made quite a journey – its inventor, Adolphe Sax, intended his instrument as a kind of “missing link” between winds and brass in the symphony orchestra, wanting  to combine the power of brass instruments with the flexibility of woodwinds, though the earliest saxophones tended to find their way into French military bands because of their ability to project their sounds outdoors. The instrument did appear in some nineteenth-century classical compositions, mostly by composers with names unknown today (has anybody previously heard the names of Jean-Baptiste Singelée, who wrote a Premier Quatuor  for Saxophones in 1857?- or Jules Demersseman, the composer of an 1860 Fantasie for Saxophone and Piano? ) but also with a number of “pioneering” examples of usage, such as in George Bizet’s incidental music for the play “L’Arlesienne” (1872), in music by Delibes (the 1876 ballet “Sylvia”) and in Massenet’s operas (“Le Roi de Lahore”, “Herodiade” and “Werther”) the earliest of these in 1877.

Of course since the turn of the century the orchestral gates have occasionally opened to admit the saxophone, with concertante works from composers such as Debussy, Glazunov and Ibert, and significant contributions from the instrument in works by Rachmaninov, Prokofiev, Strauss, Vaughan Williams, Richard Strauss and Ravel (via Mussorgsky) among others. In chamber music, too, the saxophone has noticeably figured, both in original works for the instrument and different kinds of arrangements, each of which were featured in this afternoon’s presentation by saxophonist Simon Brew and the Amici Ensemble.

Our concert began with American composer Russell Peterson’s 2003 Quintet for Alto Saxophone and Strings, the music beginning plaintively with strings only, then hauntingly continuing with the saxophone’s disarmingly dulcet tones – a sombre, processional-like exposition with gently melancholy dialogues and concerted passages – whose ambiences were then briefly but arrestingly galvanised by an impassionedly rising saxophone sequence, the music falling back to the previous subdued manner , only to again arch splendidly and disconcertingly – one was transfixed anew by the saxophone’s arresting power of utterance when at “full throttle”! –  I enjoyed the movement’s following dance-like, somewhat exotic-sounding sequences, despite a  “sameness” about the saxophone’s repeated “rise-and-fall” aspect to the music.

The second movement’s Bartok-like dance rhythms brought repeated-note patterms, more saxophonic declamations and running figurations, with the violin’s folkish lines echoed by the cello’s soulful responses. What appeared to be a third movement was begun by the saxophone, partnered by the ‘cello in a kind of  sombre and almost canonic duet, whose musings were broken into by the viola, beginning a fugal-like sequence, and joined by the second violin, the mood remaining sombre until the first violin burst in with a more dance-like line, inspiring the ‘cello to begin a spirited, “running” kind of response to which the saxophone joined, the pace of the music quickening until the opening chords of the second movement returned. This then sent the music into a kind of “spin”, the saxophone pursuing a kind of orgiastic folk-theme, whose cries brought the strings running towards and executing as one a brilliant concluding flourish!

The contrast with Max Richter’s meditative and “slow-chapp’d”  work for strings On The Nature Of Daylight,  which followed couldn’t have been more profound – at first, not unlike the opening of Strauss’s “Metamorphosen” the music almost straightaway developed in a different, more esoteric direction, beginning here with three players delivering long, slow, mesmeric and suggestive chords, until a fourth enters with a melody that derives wholly from these chord progressions. The piece’s popularity has actually begun to generate a kind of reaction to its over-use by film-makers, a counterproductive kind of  “bleeding the piece dry” effect, though Richter’s powerfully simple evocation will, like so many over-used pieces of music have previously done, doubtless survive its unselfconscious fecundity and remain fixed for future generations. I couldn’t imagine a more “centred”, sensitively-judged performance than we got here from our quartet of string-players.

The first half’s highlight for me was the Ellen Taafe Zwilich work, a 2008 Quintet for Saxophone and Strings, one with its opening Beethoven Grosse-Fugue-like beginning announcing its credentials and intents before setting off to a jogtrot-like journey throughout vistas of ear-catching detail. At first, the strings trod measured steps while the saxophone undertook a “whistling an air” kind of attitude, but with the group occasionally varying the trajectories, moving between a kind of lyrical wonderment, spontaneously impulsive gesturings and a droll “take it as it comes” manner.

Short, sharp impulses aplenty set the second movement on its intriguing course, in-and-out of occasional sequences which “papered over the cracks” in the music’s sustained lines (some evocative saxophone outpourings in places!). Our ears were kept engagingly activated by these wonderfully benign conniptions of expression, and highly entertained by an amusingly po-faced set of false “endings” to the movement leading up to the music’s true one!

The cello took up a nostalgic rocking rhythm at the third movement’s opening over which the saxophone sang a lullabic refrain, the strings joining in with a repeated-note accompaniment – fabulously ear-catching! As the saxophone began to energise its voice, the strings caught the mood and adroitly “syncopated” the exchanges, until the opening rocking rhythm made a sudden reappearance on the strings – saxophone and violin rhapsodised over the import of the moment, which intensified as the “chugging” rhythm also returned. The opening chord of the work then resounded, and echoed, before the players decided to have done with the past with a few terse, no-nonsense chords. I sat at the end, unexpectedly enchanted by it all!

After the interval, Mozart proved to be a perfect re-entry point to the concert with one of his “Prussian” Quartets (K.590 in F Major), albeit one of his greatest compositions, and one fraught with “might-have-beens” at the time the quartet was written – the circumstances have conspired to give this quartet a particularly distinctive flavour in a number of respects. At the time of writing this work the composer was in financial straits due to a recession in the Austrian economy caused by a drawn-out war with Turkey, resulting in fewer concerts and commissions. He had, in 1789, travelled to Berlin to meet the Prussian monarch Friedrich William II, an amateur cellist, hoping to make a good impression on the music-loving monarch, but instead had to be content with meeting the King’s Director of Chamber Music, the ‘cellist Jean-Pierre Dupont.

Afterwards he wrote to Constanze, his wife, that he had received money and commissions for six string quartets and six keyboard sonatas after performing for the Queen on a second visit. But there is no entry in the Court records for either money or commissions being made, and researchers have concluded that Mozart probably borrowed the money from friends, and invented the story regarding the visit and the commissions so he would have something to show for his efforts on his return to Vienna! He did complete three string quartets, two of them during 1790, the year following the Berlin visit, the second of which we heard today.

It’s an extraordinary work in itself, right from the beginning – two soft introductory notes and then a third louder and more insistent, followed by a scampering and unresolved unison descent – the whole then balanced by a repetition with solo violin, the dynamic contrasts softened, and the descent harmonically resolved. Mozart then uses that same three-note pattern and the scampered descent throughout the movement, the playing here of the Amici’s strings as deft and tonally varied as one might wish.

The following Andante has a hymn-like beginning, to which each instrument adds an embellished dance-like variation, leading to a stratospherically piquant ending. The Menuetto’s lively dance is characterised by an oscillating accompanying figure which passes from voice to voice throughout and in places moves up-and-down in almost vertiginous chromatic ways, while the Trio makes much of gawkily-witty grace-notes at some of the phrase-ends – charming! As for the finale it thrives on fluidity of utterance and quicksilver reactions, with several of the modulations seeming to flirt with atonality in places, while leaving our ears to actively wonder whether the lines would actually “find” one another again – such extraordinarily forward-looking juxtaposing of rhythms and harmonies! And what a delightfully po-faced concluding cadence – a wonderful sleight-of-hand ending!

Simon Brew brought his soprano saxophone with him this time, to conclude the concert with music by Astor Piazzolla, and featuring two excerpts from a work I’d not previously heard and was looking forward to – Piazzolla’s “The Four Seasons of Buenos Aires”. The composer originally wrote and scored the pieces separately between 1965 and 1970 for his own ensemble, which featured his own instrument, the bandoneon (a kind of accordion). Like much of the composer’s music they have been arranged for all kinds of combinations, including a version by Russian composer Leonid Desyatnikov for string ensemble which occasionally quotes from Antonio Vivaldi’s “The Four Seasons.

The Amici players performed two of  these “seasons”, winter and  spring, the first Invierno Porteño (Winter),having a gorgeous melancholic flavour, with much languishing at the piece’s beginning, and then with the saxophone tones bring out a truly exotic flavour to the textures and tones. Both pieces use the term Porteño, a word referring to a native of Buenos Aires, so that the Spring is given the name Primavera Porteña –  the music’s somewhat livelier than the first piece, though the players here give even the slower middle section’s rhythms plenty of “heft” . We enjoyed the experience so much we were able to persuade the ensemble to return to the platform and give us some more Piazzolla, a characteristically sultry opening, with the strings sighing as the saxophone literally took flight, the lines soaring like a bird, before the instrument brought these impulses back to earth, joining the strings for a soulful concluding melody in luscious thirds. Gorgeous sounds! – we couldn’t have helped enjoying the ensemble’s wonderfully cosmopolitean adventurings throughout a variety of times and places – a real treat for the senses in every way!

Still more musical miracles reported and evidenced in Wellington, this time at Roseneath’s The Long Hall!

Posted on by Peter Mechen

The creative spirit continues to work wonders in Te Whanganui-a-Tara, Aotearoa – (“Kei te ora tonu te wairua auaha ki Te Whanganui-a-Tara o Aotearoa”)

Peter Gjelsten tackles a Bach Violin Sonata (No. 2 in A Minor BWV 1003) at The Long Hall, Roseneath

The Chamber Pot-Pourri Ensemble
A Kaibosh Food Rescue Benefit Concert

ROSS HARRIS – 2 Micro-Trios (2020)
Helene Pohl, Peter Gjelsten (violins), Rolf Gjelsten (‘cello)
NICCOLO PAGANINI – Caprice No. 9 for solo violin
JS BACH – Sonata for solo violin in A Minor BWV 1003
Peter Gjelsten  (violin)
CRAIG UTTING – Four Wellington Dances for violin and cello
Helene Pohl (violin), Rolf Gjelsten (‘cello)
FRANZ JOSEF HAYDN – String Quartet in G Major Op.33 No. 5
Helene Pohl, Peter Gjelsten (violins)
Sophia Acheson (viola), Rolf Gjelsten (‘cello)

The Long Hall, Point Jerningham, Roseneath
Saturday 21st March, 2026

Fresh from attending my first St.Andrew’s-on-The-Terrace lunchtime concert earlier in the week, I had the good fortune to catch another. not dissimilar kind of musical happening – this one a 2026 “first” for the capital of a series instigated a year ago by violinist Helene Pohl at Roseneath’s “The Long Hall”, situated on the Point Jerningham lookout reserve next to Roseneath Primary School. The concerts are designed to alternatively support the Kaibosh Food Rescue charity, and the Arohanui Strings, the Sistema-inspired early intervention music education programme. The Kaibosh charity makes a significant difference to food and energy waste and carbon emissions, enabling thousands of kilos of food to be redistributed to community groups, resulting in renewed efforts by the same musicians over the present in continuing and supporting an eminently worthwhile venture.

Thanks to the inspiration, skills and capacity for hard work of Helene Pohl and ‘cellist Rolf Gjelsten, the 2025 concert series was a great success. The two musicians, aided by various colleagues, were able to simultaneously commemorate and take advantage of composer Dmitri Shostakovich’s 50th death anniversary, performing a number of the composer’s chamber works in tandem with a wide range of other pieces, including a couple of contemporary works written specifically for these concerts (and therefore both world premieres!) by composers currently both on-and off-shore, Ross Harris and Gao Ping, respectively.

Now, to begin the 2026 series the Long Hall’s opening Kaibosh Food Rescue programme paid appropriate homage to some of the previous year’s delights, including works by “resident” composers (two of whom were present today!), as well as instrumental solos which illustrated the power of a single voice’s communication, and a string quartet by the composer who effectively defined the form and whose efforts provided all kinds of “springboards’ for those others who followed suit.

First up was music representing a kind of timely antidote to Aotearoa New Zealand’s present version of Trumpish madness, two Micro-Trios by Ross Harris, written during the much-discussed lockdown period of 2020 for the Pohl/Gjelsten family members present today. The two works, as if conceived with different personalities in mind, displayed contrasting characters, the first beginning in a restless, slightly anxious 5/4 which developed more forthright impulses befitting a kind of “confused turmoil of being” in response to the isolated circumstances. The second work took a more lyrical approach, with long-linked lines attracting all kinds of impulses which attached themselves to the lines before dropping off the pace and wandering quizzically through unfamiliar vistas (like an ageing process, perhaps – with apologies to the composer!).

Violinist Peter Gjelsten followed up his 2025 performance of Eugène Ysaÿe’s Third Sonata (“Ballade”) for Solo Violin with another work by a virtuoso violinist-composer, perhaps the doyen of them all, Niccolo Paganini – The Ninth of his 24 Caprices for solo violin was given here with plenty of confidence and elan, the opening “hunting calls” resounding their thirds with spirited effect in dynamically-contrasted episodes readily suggesting the shouts of purpose and encouragement from the riders relishing the chase.  The “sport”was given plenty of incident by the violinist’s confident throwing-off a middle-section’s skitterish runs broken by stentorian phrases, suggesting both mishap and success in the pursuit!

Sterner stuff followed these hi-jinks, with Peter Gjelsten giving us JS Bach’s wonderful A Minor Sonata for solo violin, one of three Sonatas for the solo instrument, all of which are often coupled as a performing edition with three Partitas for the same instrument. An all-purpose differentiation between the two titles “Sonata” and “Partita” is that the former is traditionally a four-movement structure which often features linked slow-fast sections  and a fugue, whereas a Partita consists of different types of Renaissance/ Baroque dance movements. True to type this Sonata includes a fugue as the second movement.

First impressions of this work emphasised seriousness over gaiety, the solemn, declamatory opening commanding our attention with the player’s presence of intonation and command of nuance giving his listeners an engaging sense of exploration right to the movement’s final questioning note. The Fugue’s elegance and poise at the outset opens out, Gjelsten finding plenty of room for variations of tone and presenting an astonishing array of different voices – the music’s trajectories buildup and carry us along with wonderful ”heads of steam”, so that the phrases and statements really resonate.

Gjelsten’s control of the Andante’s pulse enabled both melody and rhythm to coexist, often in little more than whisperings, but with an underlying strength of overall purpose. We felt taken to another world by the second half of the movement, with the composer  seeming to allow us a lingering glimpse of his serenity of outlook and purpose of faith – I could imagine a young player in future years delving even further into the music’s timelessness that allow these sounds to linger long after the player ceases. The concluding Allegro is here excitingly launched and teasingly sustained with the antiphonal alternating phrases made here to dance through our sensibilities’ spaces. The rapidly-executed impulses have an exhilarating ring to them, and we’re “teased” with what seems like the approach of a final cadence, but with geyser-like irruptions that suddenly push the boundaries out further – tantalizing playing that keeps us on our toes and  enables us to relish the music all the more.

We had been promised a quick, “straight-through” concert at the beginning, so our kaleidoscopic musical journey  suddenly whirled us homewards via local composer Craig Utting’s engaging “Four Wellington Dances”, for violin and ‘cello (written in 2025 for Helene and Rolf.) The work began with an entirely apposite “Wind Dance”, a nagging 7/8 perpetuo-molto rhythm  by turns driving, teasing and cajoling the notes into sound-impulses whose insistence any Wellingtonians would recognise, and with alternating instruments adding a moaning-sighing figure over the agitations, catching their constant unpredictabilities. Next was the strangely mesmeric “Whale Song”, introduced by spectral “con sordino” violin tones (which set the scene for strangeness) and galvanised further by hauntingly-charged “vocalisings”, firstly in the lower and then upper registers of the ‘cello – an incredible soundscape, tapping into a “natural world” communication, with the instruments conveying a real sense of ambient surroundings and language essentially removed from human interaction.

“Seagulls”, the third dance, has an introduction flecked with further atmospheric touches, such as the ‘cello playing eerie glissandi to the violin’s arpeggiations and rather touching “seafarer’s song”, first played, incidentally, lower than the ‘cello’s accompaniments, though the instruments exchange their roles at certain points – the melody is a real charmer, replete with nostalgia! Finally, the “Habanada” imbues a well-known operatic rhythm with a mischievous spirit during short sequences of dance-tunes and  illicit collaborations with ostensibly unlikely partners such as Saint-Saens’s “The Swan” and Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Bumble Bee”, with even Mendelssohn’s “Wedding March” making a brief appearance before falling down the stairs and (thankfully) coming to its concluding senses!

After all of this, what better finale than to be given a masterwork from a composer whose music paralleled the conditions that produced each of the concert’s preceding works – isolation, compositional mastery, instrumental fluency, and a need for entertainment? All these things come together in the string quartets of Franz Joseph Haydn, whose Op.33 set of six string quartets were written in 1781, and became known as the “Russian” Quartets, due to the dedication to the Grand Duke Paul of Russia. Another nickname given to these works is Gli Scherzi  (The Jokes) referring to the replacement of the older style Minuet with a quicker, more dynamic movement.

Here, then was the fifth of the Quartets from this Op.39 set, a work which itself has been nicknamed with the English sobriquet phrase “How do you do?”, drawing attention to the Quartet’s very beginning, a pianissimo galant cadence which actually returns to conclude the movement with which it started. the opening “How do you do?” cadence is only a prelude to the ensuing Molto Allegro, which seizes hold of the argument and propels it excitingly forwards. The mood lightens for the lyrical second subject, only to unexpectedly plunge into the almost “groaning downwards” chromatic modulation towards the end of the exposition. The volatile development dances, swoops and plunges as the music unfolds, releasing almost operatic surges of energy in places, with the “how do you do” cadence realigning the music’s focus for a recapitulation – we are, by this time, agog at the music’s volatilities, and marvel at how quickly the music races to its concluding cadences without missing a beat!

Our heartstrings are tugged immediately by the slow movement’s intensities, most strenuously propelled forwards with almost unrelenting energy, to which one simply has to surrender and allow oneself to be borne aloft and taken somewhere. What a contrast, therefore, with the impishly impulsive Scherzo, filled with all kinds of hesitancies and impulses!  The Trio brings a steadier, more genteel character, as if wishing to reform such excesses, though to no avail when the opening returns, as quirky and ornery as ever, though with a touch, perhaps, of guilt via its almost evanescent ending!

After this, the finale’s music is almost prim and proper, in what seems like variation form, with the first violin decorating and elaborating on the melodic line in both subsequent variation movements, and then, the viola and cello taking turns to decorate the dance steps for a subsequent movement. Finally, there’s a Presto which scampers to a satisfyingly breathless conclusion!

Such a lot packed into a relatively short time! Nevertheless, we were replete – delighted by the music and the playing, and honoured by the good and prestigious company – a truly memorable occasion!

 

Masterpieces from masterly musicians – A St. Andrew’s lunchtime concert, from Rolf Gjelsten and Nicole Chao

Posted on by Peter Mechen

St.Andrew’s-on-The-Terrace Church, Wellington  – Lunchtime Concert Series

BEETHOVEN – ‘Cello Sonata No. 3 in A Major Op.69
TCHAIKOVSKY (arr. Fitzenhagen) – Variations on a Rococo Theme Op.33

Rolf Gjelsten (‘cello) and Nicole Chao (piano)

Wednesday 18th March 2026

Review for “Middle C” by Peter Mechen

“Two masterpieces for the ‘cello-and-piano repertoire, delivered by a pair of musicians regarded as among the country’s top players of their respective instruments” – well, it  sounds like nothing less than a dream prescription for a concert!  Alternatively, the blurb for the occasion could have fixed as easily upon its contrast with present-day scenarios – ranging from world-wide upheavals undermining one’s sense of national and personal security to localised disillusionment and desperation faced with escalating dysfunctional infrastructure and cost-of-living price-hikes – and invited us “to escape from it all into the relative bliss of St.Andrew’s-on-The-Terrace Church for a free lunchtime concert of uplifting music”.

However one chooses to view these regular Wednesday lunchtime concert occasions they have given many Wellingtonian classical music-lovers much joy with a stimulating variety of performers and repertoire. In this case we were thoroughly spoilt as regards the concert’s essential ingredients, with cellist Rolf Gjelsten, late of the New Zealand String Quartet, but more recently affiliated with Korimako, a piano/string trio formed with pianist Michael Endres and violinist Helene Pohl, and here joining forces with pianist Nicole Chao, most readily associated with the much-acclaimed Duo Enharmonics together with fellow-pianist Beth Chen.

I had heard Rolf Gjelsten’s solo playing on a couple of occasions, most recently in an absolutely delightful performance of JS Bach’s Third Violincello Suite in C Major at a “Long Hall” Roseneath concert; but I’d not heard Nicole Chao as a solo recitalist since briefly at a 2009 song-recital concert with soprano Nicola Holt, where for an instrumental interlude she gave an atmospheric, by turns finely-detailed and splendidly volatile performance of Chopin’s Fourth Ballade. Though not solo performances this time round, today’s offerings readily demonstrated the technical and interpretative skills of each of the players, brought together beautifully here in St.Andrew’s.

As befitted such a positive partnership, the occasion featured an actual milestone in the repertoire of the solo ‘cello with Ludwig van Beethoven’s ground-breaking Cello Sonata in A Major Op.69. Though this was the third actual sonata of five written for the instrument by Beethoven, this one was the first which gave “equal partnership” status to the ‘cello in a sonata, instead of  (as with the composer’s two Op.5 works, described as “piano sonatas with accompaniment by the ‘cello”) merely providing a supporting role for the keyboard. In fact Beethoven wrote this work for the same cellist, Nikolaus Kraft, who had taken part in the first performance in 1808 of the composer’s Triple Concerto.

At the work’s beginning the ‘cello celebrates its new-found status with its solo announcement of the opening theme, effortlessly floated into being by Rolf Gjelsten  before intensifying the tones with the instrument’s alighting upon a sustained E – to which Nicole Chao’s piano then replies with a lyrical “rounding -off” of the theme and a brief flourish. What follows is an enthralling exchange of ideas which each player acts upon in a sense of both thoughtful contribution and impulsive challenge to the music’s argument – I’ve always loved the music’s ascending runs in this movement, figurations that seem to me to almost “dare” each player (but especially the cellist in the second, higher figuration!) to markedly “sound” and relish these ascents, a kind of “flight of fancy” that’s contrasted with the earthily, no-nonsense agitato plungings into the succeeding episodes by both instruments. The minor-key passage which constitutes the development is delivered with the same focused combination of energy and fancy, breathtaking in its “give-and-take” rapport throughout lyrical and impassioned sequences. And ‘cellist’s and pianist’s instinctive capacity for mutual understanding beautifully bring off the sequence which transforms what sounds like a “third exposition” into the movement’s coda, turning Beethoven’s simplest of phrase-resolutions into a precious kind of homecoming, complete with a “grandstand finish” for the pundits!

The allegro molto Scherzo became something of an “anything you can do” game of syncopated daring, exhilarating to give oneself over to and feel “borne along“ by the players’  sharply-focused trajectories – again, music with contrasting episodes afforded by an obsessively grumbling trio and a po-faced pizzicato coda. No slow movement as such – but an opening sequence of rapt lyrical beauty, wrought by playing that seemed to commune with listeners in mutual enjoyment, before abruptly and mischievously breaking into a precipitous, fleet-fingered (footed?) dance, one which delights as much in contrast of mood as anywhere else in this sonata. So Gjelsten and Chao revelled as much in the music’s “sotto voce” excitement as in the hell-for-leather passages, enabling the energies unleashed by Beethoven to tingle expectantly throughout both exuberant and more circumspect passages – such a COMPLETE performance!

Those of us who had seen the concert’s original listing were expecting the Tchaikovsky Rococo Variations to follow, but the printed programme at the church had listed only the Beethoven work – so some people (feeling with every good reason satisfied with what they’d already heard) were getting up to leave when the musicians reappeared for the second item. As well most returned, because the Tchaikovsky work, normally heard in concert played by ‘cello and orchestra, was given simply gorgeous treatment by Gjelsten and Chao, to the point where I found myself preferring the ‘cello-and-piano combination to the original!

I would imagine most cellists are aware of the controversy accompanying this work from its inception, largely due to the activities of its dedicatee, Wilhelm Fitzenhagen, a German cellist and fellow-professor at the Moscow Conservatory, who had given the first performance of the work in 1877. Fitzenhagen had been asked by Tchaikovsky for advice regarding his finished “first-draft” for ‘cello and piano, but the composer wasn’t prepared for the extent to which his dedicatee then “revised” the score with the changes (both in the solo and accompaniment parts) then being incorporated into the published ‘cello-and-orchestra score). Though Tchaikovsky was documented as being furious at Fitzenhagen’s changes, his displeasure never actually translated into action, and the score was published in 1889 in the dedicatee’s version.

Tchaikovsky’s own version of the work wasn’t performed until 1941 in Moscow, but the score of the original had to wait until 1956 to be completely reconstructed, along with the cello-piano arrangement (though even the reconstructed version has been questioned because of the methodology used!). Several recordings have now been made of the original, though the Fitzenhagen version still regularly appears in concert and on record. It wasn’t made clear at today’s concert whether the version used by the musicians was Tchaikovsky/Fitzenhagen, or echt-Tchaikovsky (enquiries to this end are proceeding!).

I grew up with the “Fitzenhagen edition” of the work (used by practically all the  versions on record at the time), as per the recording by Rostropovich with Rozhdestvensky and the Leningrad Philharmonic, and loved it to pieces, though I also heard Janos Starker play the work with the NZSO in the1980s in Palmerston North (also a fabulous concert!). I bought what I believed to be the first-ever recording of Tchaikovksy’s original version of the work, made by cellist Raphael Wallfisch as long ago as 1983, but haven’t played it as much as I have the earlier recording, preferring to my shame the “dark side” territory of Fitzenhagen’s version – it seems to me that the only crime regarding the latter’s rearrangement of the work was that he wasn’t Tchaikovsky!

What we got here from Gjelsten and Chao sounded to my ears pretty well like the version I’d become accustomed to – and the playing gave me such pleasure I hardly stopped for a moment to consider just whose work I was hearing. Undoubtedly the sheer elan and sensitive beauties of the playing here influenced my feelings concerning the matter, but I felt the music in this instrumental format reflected even more deeply the composer’s love for Mozart and the classical style surrounding his work – and the “theme” itself wasn’t an existing rococo or classical melody, but Tchaikovsky’s own.

The work’s two concluding sequences here sounded particularly captivating – the Andante presented a sorrowful minor-key song, with the melodic line augmented by echo-like effects from both instruments, the whole rounded off by piano musings and a wistful ascending ‘cello phrase. It had an intimacy which the piano-and-orchestra version couldn’t replicate. Then, with the Allegro vivo Finale and Coda we got a spirited, exhilarating finish, with the cello’s vigorous utterances made playful by the piano’s counter-melody before both instruments finished the piece with suitably demonstrative gestures. We couldn’t have asked for anything more satisfying from two musicians in absolute accord with one another and with the music!

 

 

 

 

Melencolia – ANTHONY RITCHIE – Three String Quartets, from the Jade String Quartet

Posted on by Peter Mechen

MELENCOLIA
ANTHONY RITCHIE’S STRING QUARTETS 1-3
Jade String Quartet
Miranda Adams, Charmian Keay (violins).
Robert Ashworth (viola), James Yoo (’cello)

Producer: Kenneth Young
Engineers: John Kim, Steve Garden
RATTLE RAT-D159 2025

After first-time listening right through in a single, totally absorbed (occasionally transfixed) sitting to a recently issued Rattle Records recording of Anthony Ritchie’s three string quartets, here played by the remarkable Jade String Quartet, I found myself afterwards wishing my tongue could utter the thoughts that arose in me!

Rousing myself from the daze I’d drifted into, I couldn’t help thinking of a similar “body” of works I’d recently been made familiar with to an unprecedented degree – the string quartets of another composer, Dmitri Shostakovich, whose music has been “spotlit” here in Aotearoa New Zealand, during the latter’s 50th death anniversary year. It simply and suddenly occurred to me (I freely admit, on an acquaintance that was, at this stage, hardly in-depth in either case!) that both composers seemed to have taken pains to reserve a certain concentrated quality of utterance for the string quartet medium.

In Shostakovich’s case, beleaguered as he was for writing “public” music (symphony, opera, concerto, cantata) which didn’t “conform” with the authorities’ need for artists to produce “uplifting, positive-sounding” works that reflected the joys of life under the rule of the great dictator, Josef Stalin, the composer turned to the “more private” medium of the string quartet to utter those personal aspirations, comments, and criticisms which for many years couldn’t be made in public. Only with the death of Stalin in 1953 was any kind of freedom of expression mooted for artists, and even then and afterwards there were disapproving “official” voices raised against some of Shostakovich’s later works.

Hardly a jot of semblance links Shostakovich with Anthony Ritchie regarding the conditions under which they wrote their music, except for the fact of both having to wait long periods for certain of their works to be performed after composition – Shostakovich 25 years after the composition of his 4th Symphony, Ritchie a whopping 37 years for his First String Quartet to be premiered after its completion! What forcibly struck me when hearing the Jade Quartet’s stupendous new Ritchie recording was the music’s startling originality and definitive focus, a “this is what I mean” kind of voice that I found put me frequently in mind of the Russian composer with his string quartets, and the single-mindedness of those uncompromising utterances.


                   Anthony Ritchie

Ritchie’s three quartets reach over a period of no less than forty years, with the first one written in 1983, while the composer was studying in Hungary at the Liszt Academy in Budapest, researching the music of Bela Bartok for his PhD. Writing music in such resonating surroundings could have made it difficult to fetch up a properly distinctive voice, but in the First Quartet’s opening Solo viola and trio Ritchie’s deep-browed solo viola voice straightaway captures something in the folkish air that awakens different responses…. such that could perhaps prove both accompanists, and even further, themselves become caretakers of the journey.

Quartet 1 has overlapping 7/4-like phrases, with beautifully- and delicately-inversed vertical figures, morphing into and out of pizzicato, as the motif plays “lost-and-found” in a plethora of activity. The bows bounce upon strings, then each theatrically lapses into sequences of theatrical recitative as the others gossip in pairs –  “What a rude glissando! – Yes, wasn’t it!”. The reputedly 7/4 rhythm returns, with arco, pizzicato – and silence! The next Solo ’cello and trio opens exotically, with folkish phrases and “turns”, before the solo cello enters, working wonderfully declamations into the line, before unaccountably appearing to fall asleep! Are the other instruments then dreaming the ‘cello, or is the ‘cello dreaming them?

Quartet 2 delightfully plays “catch-me-if-you-can” passages, with cheeky “portrait” poses taking turns before being off again, entangling themselves convivially in each others’ figurations! – exhilarating! – More reflections, before there’s a surreptitious swoop, and exclamations of  “pretend fright” before the façade is gone without a trace. Immediately, more serious business arrives in Duets – gone are the triplet-rhythmed fun-and-games, for these are the heavies, working in pairs, and not even the most impassioned pleas will stop them, it seems! A respite is brief, as the attack resumes from the air, but the responses hold their ground!

The tumult slows and morphs into Quartet 3  without a break – a disjointed world with its inhabitants trying to join forces with growing intensities and desperations! – Again, we’re taken straight to the next and last movement, Four solos – each vying for supremacy, pleading its case, so eloquent and piteous! – the tumult gradually ceases as the voices realise they have done what’s possible and viable for themselves and for one another – and we suspect that it’s the viola who returns to have the last word!

The Jade String Quartet:  Robert Ashworth (viola), Maranda Adams (violin),  Charmian Keay (violiin),  James Yoo (‘cello)

The Jade String Quartet has more-or-less taken over guardianship of this astonishing work of late, giving only the second public performance in Auckland last year (2024), and subsequently making this recording – the group’s espousal of the work’s determinedly-focused sense of youthful adventure on the composer’s part will surely win the music many new friends.

As for the equally compelling String Quartet No. 2 (2003), the work was commissioned and premiered by the Nevine String Quartet on a Chamber Music New Zealand tour, the group then then recording the work for Atoll Records on a CD (Octopus – Atoll ACD112) which featured several of Ritchie’s chamber music pieces. Less immediately recorded than the Jade Quartet, the Nevine’s reading brings out more of the work’s spaciousness and, particularly in the second movement, an attractive “Whistler-like” ambience, the music’s blue-grey colourings and lullabic tones at once so suggestive and evanescent. Elsewhere, the newer recording’s closer balance and the Jade’s sharper and more volatile responses engage the listener in what feels like a more tactile and primitive kind of engagement – the music’s swaggering gait at the very beginning has tremendous physicality, and contrasts beautifully with the “sighing” sequences that decorate the later ostinato passages, the ending’s piquant gesturings drawing us wonderingly into the silences.

Wonderful writing throughout the Like a Lullaby second movement – with the Nevines we lose ourselves in the ambiences, whereas the Jade Quartet doesn’t relinquish its tight grip on our sensibilities, heightening the sense of unease and shadows that are unresolved. The violin’s “voice from the gloom” stimulates other voices to follow, then leads the way out when the tensions reach disturbing levels, allowing the angst to gradually ebb away – incredible playing in both versions!

The third movement’s Allegro Pesante has more incisive, razor-sharp attack from the Jade Quartet, almost unrelenting in its penetrative persistence, contrasting the “slow waltz” aspect of the Trio all the more with the soulful melancholy of its lines, as does the return of the biting opening reacquaint us with its fearful obsessive manner. Both performances vividly characterise the finale’s juxtapositioning of its Misterioso opening with a driving allegro molto, the music’s sharply contrasting moods reflecting the extent of variation exhibited in human behaviour, an anomaly suggested by the dissonance of the work’s final  chord.

Moving our time machine’s dial forward once again we encounter Ritchie’s String Quartet No, 3, not inappropriately subtitled “In Time”, and composed specifically for the Jade Quartet in 2023. Its programme is ostensibly an oblique commentary on the stages of human life in general term, the movements “framed” by a First Dance and a Last Dance, and sporting pensive titles such as Heartbeat, Perpetual Motion and Funeral March, each bearing associated “mortal coil” confluences.

First Dance is vibrant and changeable, good-humoured and acerbic, essentially interactive, and expressing joy in its sharing – a marked contrast with Heartbeat, where everything is subjected to the “steady beat of time”, the responses to the plucked rhythms occasionally “out of synch”, suggesting arrhythmia or ectopic beats as part of the human condition. There’s also touches of Haydn’s drollery in places, as with the latter’s “The Clock” Symphony.

Perpetual Motion is something else again, the rhythms angular and anxious, going in and out of both conviction and certainty – the playing builds up wonderfully aggregated trajectories before the music self-reflectedly winds down, a single voice cast adrift – “frei aber einsam” – its solitariness a contrast with that of the following Funeral March, and its intensely communal outpourings of emotion from those still living. After this, Last Dance is something of a surprise, a kind of “is that all there is?” response to the certainty of life’s ending – the music conjures up a determination to vitalise existence with almost folk-fiddle-like movement, energy and life, to the point of obsessiveness and even hints of desperation – but the final gesture is determinedly upbeat and unequivocal!

This is a release to put with two other landmark recordings of string quartets by New Zealand composers that I’ve enjoyed over the years – Anthony Watson’s on a 1994 Continuum CD  (CCD1065), and Gareth Farr’s recorded by the Morrison Music Trust on MMT 2019.  The new disc of Anthony Ritchie’s trio of quartets from the superb Jade String Quartet has already given me the utmost pleasure, as outlined above – and I look forward to many more rehearings, both here and in concert! Thoroughly recommended!

SHOSTAKOVICH – “unpacked” and emptied out – a life’s remarkable music

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Estella Wallace introduces her new work “Of Sorrows” at the Prefab Hall, Wellington’s “Shostakovich Unpacked” – photo: Maeve O’Connell

SHOSTAKOVICH UNPACKED – Concert Series from the New Zealand String Quartet

DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH – Piano Quintet in G Minor Op. 57 (1940)
Sonata for Viola and Piano Op.147 (1975)

ESTELLA WALLACE – Of Sorrows, for String Quartet (2025)  – world premiere

Gillian Ansell (viola, New Zealand String Quartet)
Peter Clark (violin, New Zealand String  Quartet)
Anna Van Der Zee (guest violinist, New Zealand String Quartet)
Andrew Joyce (guest ‘cellist, New Zealand String Quartet)
Jian Liu, piano

Prefab Hall, Jessie St., Wellington
Tuesday, 25th November, 2025

Shostakovich and his music have never before had it quite so good in Wellington New Zealand – throughout this year of years for the composer (the fiftieth anniversary of his death) his music has undergone an exploration of a concentrated focus not previously experienced to the same extent in the capital. I recall a few great Shostakovich moments from past NZSO concerts here – among them, Kurt Sanderling (in the Town Hall in 1981) conducting the composer’s Fifth Symphony, and Vasily Petrenko (at Michael Fowler) with the epic “Leningrad” Symphony – but these were drops in the ocean compared with the relative riches served up to us during 2025. Orchestra Wellington’s stunning Shostakovich season took in the first five symphonies and a shortened concert version of the composer’s notorious opera “Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District”  (sadly, the NZSO seemed to completely ignore the commemoration, even though given carte blanche regarding any of the ten remaining Shostakovich symphonies by Orchestra Wellington’s programming). As well, various chamber ensembles with players made up of both current and ex-New Zealand String Quartet members performed a number of the string quartets and several of the other chamber works. Yes, we could have done with some solo piano music as well (as far as I know Wellington awaits a first complete performance of the composer’s remarkable Op.87 Preludes and Fugues for solo piano) but one must instead be truly grateful for what we were enabled to receive! – in short, quite a year!

This evening’s concert in the New Zealand String Quartet’s enterprising “Shostakovich Unpacked” series gave us a delightful “bonus” item in the form of a new piece written by Estella Wallace, a student at Te Koki New Zealand School of Music, and the winner of a new “Finlayson Prize for Composition”. This competition was developed in partnership between the NZSM and SOUNZ Centre for New Zealand Music, and sponsored by the Hon. Christopher Finlayson in the form of prize money and a number of professional development opportunities for the winner – composition students had been invited to create new works “inspired by or responding to” the music of Dmitri Shostakovich.

Estella Wallace herself introduced her work “Of Sorrows” to us at the concert’s beginning, speaking about her love of Shostakovich’s music in general, and her fascination with his Viola Sonata which we were to hear tonight. She talked about using fragments and themes from the music into her work, as well as her own responses to “the tension and sorrows” of the life he had lived. Her piece tread an adroitly-shaped path balanced between tension and melancholy right from its beginning with arresting opening chords reiterated to interrupt a violin recitative, and melodic lines that followed savaged by frenetic scherzo-like figurations, the thematic material coming thick and fast, via driving trajectories and wailing melody-lines. These gave way to eerily ambient chordings from sul ponticello violins, to which the viola joined, its melody darkly “coloured” by the other instruments – introspective and truly desolate –  bringing the work to a poignant conclusion. These thoughts – jotted down “on the run” – came, in the capable hands of the New Zealand String Quartet, from a powerful and deeply-engraved impression on this listener and on an appreciative audience at the end.

Perhaps it would have been even more appropriate to have played Wallace’s piece as a prelude to the Viola Sonata at the second half’s beginning  – still, in view of the frequent contrasts of mood in Shostakovich’s work as a whole, it did no violence to contrast this opening piece’s sobrieties with the Piano Quintet’s arresting and  flamboyantly ceremonial, neo-Baroque piano solo opening, here spectacularly and sonorously played by Jian Liu. The quartet of strings echoed the music’s declamatory splendour before setting off with the viola in attendance on a sombre waltz which, however, developed with the other instruments into a full-scale, almost epically-surging elaboration of the material of the kind the composer admired in intricate Baroque music but also felt as if it owed something to late-romantic fulsomeness!

The Fugue which followed, begun quietly by the strings and then joined by the piano, gradually became more impassioned, with the exchanges intensifying until the piano commandingly took centre-stage with a grand recitative statement followed by the other instruments in more conciliatory tones which brought our sensibilities closer to a sense of “peace”, possibly a reaction of the composer’s to the turmoil he experienced during  the years leading up to the Fifth Symphony. Towards the end the strings brought out a richly-phrased theme which, together with the piano, sighed, reiterated, grumbled, and then resounded with finality.

Next, the Allegretto Scherzo danced its way cheekily into the soundscape, its somewhat artless theme nevertheless keeping the music’s energies on task with (readily inverted) clarion calls, and ”shepherding” the music back from trio-sounding excursions into vortex-like episodes which rather alarmingly build up unwanted tensions until suddenly things were defused, and brought back in line – as the famed conductor Sir Thomas Beecham once observed in a different context, this music couldn’t help but give the idea, in places, as if a lot of yaks were there all jumping about!

The Intermezzo, marked Lento  brought pizzicato cello and arco violin  together, joined by the viola, tones invested with exquisitely-nuanced variety by Anna Van Der Zee’s solo violin and Gillian Ansell’s viola – then with Jian Liu’s piano as a patiently sonorous guide all the strings “grew” their figured  intensities in pairs, Peter Clark’s violin matching Anna Van Der Zee’s and Andrew Joyce’s ‘cello in complete accord with Gillian Ansell’s dusky utterances. And the “where to from here? question begun by a somewhat awry canonic sequence from the violins was of course resolved by the composer with the piano!

I simply adored the playing in this final movement –  the piano’s initial confidence and sparkle, the strings’ moments of chromatic unease, the fanfare-like surges of hope, the continued vacillations as the strings continued to wrestle with their doubts, the viola and ‘cello seemingly more confident at times  in a “come on” sort of way, and the piano always ready to rally the troops – the ending, when it came was like a musical smile of quiet relief, and certainly balm for tortured sensibilities…..a cherishable moment!

Gillian Ansell (viola) and Jian Liu (piano) play Shostakovich’s Viola Sonata – photo: Maeve O’Connell

And then, after the interval, we found ourselves suddenly transported to the composer’s “evening”, thirty-five years later, with his valedictory Viola Sonata. At various times Shostakovich had expressed a wish to write a viola sonata to go with  those for violin and cello that he had completed. He only just made it in relation to his failing health as he died in August 1975 shortly after the work was finished – he was able to tell its dedicatee, the violist Fyodor Druzhinin on July 5th 1975 that he had completed the work and sent it off to be published. The work was first performed privately at Shostakovich’s apartment on September 25th by Druizhinin, with pianist Mikhail Muntyan, and received its first public performance in October that same year from the same artists.

In her illuminating programme note Gillian Ansell told us what we needed to know regarding the music’s circumstances along with something of its character. Before beginning the performance she and Jian Liu demonstrated to us something of the significance of the composer’s frequent use in the work’s finale of recognisable phrases from Beethoven’s “Moonlight” Sonata.

Although much of the composer’s later music was dark and pessimistic, this work is different, especially in the outer movements. The first movement of this work is marked Moderato, and was described by the composer as a “novella”, a description which suggests something smaller or reduced in scale, more concentrated. The opening pizzicato notes (recalling Alban Berg’s Violin Concerto), led to a soulful kind of dialogue between the instruments, gradually leading to a great mid-movement outburst – great “schwung from both players – one followed by the piano quoting the opening pizzicato notes nd the violin playing eerie sul ponticello tones. A strange, unsettling waltz-tune followed, leading to a cadenza which interspersed the opening pizzicato notes played arco, then returning to the pizzicato at the movement’s end.

The scherzo which followed used material from the composer’s unfinished opera “The Gamblers” – we enjoyed plenty of folkish “slides” and note-bending  in this sardonic and sometimes savage kind of “danse macabre” – a darkly sinister viola theme led to a kind of “trio” begun by great pizzicato and furthered by declamatory exchanges and an impassioned string solo before the dance returned, as volatile and ornery in places as before, and then gradually fading into indeterminant spaces.

The finale began with a beautifully-sustained string solo, capped off by soft pizzicato notes, out of which came the piano’s first, deeply-voiced three-note figurations  bringing to mind the spirit of Beethoven, and answered by the violin’s voicing of the “Moonlight” Sonata’s theme, simply the dotted phrase’s opening with (sometimes) the first rising note of its continuation, here repeated and varied continually. It was even brought into an impassioned cadenza, whose mood then took over the viola-and-piano exchanges, as if the composer was wrestling with demons rather than fond remembrances (with quotes from his symphonies and the Second Violin Concerto tumbling through the music), before giving up the struggle and accepting that all of this was, in fact, a farewell to life. How interesting that it was the unassuming viola to which Shostakovich had given pride of place to perform this momentous task!

This concert made a brilliant and fitting finale to the New Zealand String Quartet’s richly-crafted commemorative 2025 tribute in memory of the life and work of one of the twentieth century’s most truly significant creative artists. Heartfelt bravos to all who contributed to bringing the music of Dmitri Shostakovich into such finely-crafted focus for all of us here to enjoy!

 

 

Late-afternoon Bach and Shostakovich – worlds and times apart sounding together….

Posted on by Peter Mechen

JS BACH – Suite No. 3 in C Major for Solo Violincello BWV 1009
Rolf Gjelsten  (‘cello)
DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH – String Quartets: No 5  in B-flat (1952) / No. 2  in A Major Op. 68 (1944)
The Chamber Pot-Pourri Ensemble:
Helene Pohl, Simeon Broom (violins), Nicholas Hancox (viola), Rolf Gjelsten (’cello)

The Long Hall, Roseneath, Wellington
Saturday, 18th November, 2025

“Wuthering Heights” might have been an apter name for Roseneath’s “The Long Hall” on Saturday afternoon, when Wellington’s Point Jerningham resoundingly lived up to its reputation as the windiest spot in the capital during a concert given by the Chamber Pot-Pourri Ensemble, one in which the wind played at pedal points, drones, and vigorous ostinati as constant accompaniments to the music-making.  The latter, of course, persisted and eventually triumphed, with the players’ all-pervading focus on the music happily relegating such disruptions, however tumultuous, to an incidental, scarcely noticeable in situ degree.

The Ensemble’s quartet personnel has undergone fascinating and fruitful variation over the year, in particular regarding a second violinist, and featuring luminaries such as Monique Lapins, Anna van der Zee and Peter Gjelsten in the position. For this concert the player was Simeon Broom, currently an NZSO member with a number of years’ valuable experience spent in various orchestras overseas. Each of the quartet performances in this concert demonstrated both the group’s flexibility and individual members’ skills at adaptation to fresh combinations, auguring well for continuance of presentation by the ensemble of one of chamber music’s core repertoire resources.

As well they might for the purposes of such an exploration of what is becoming increasingly apparent to me as one of the great cornerstones of musical expression of its time and its relevance for other times – Dmitri Shostakovich’s fifteen string quartets. Though Beethoven’s acclaimed cycle of quartets would seem like an obvious inspiration to any aspiring composer tackling the same genre of works, Shostakovich’s relationship with the form took a different path over time, with the young composer, mindful of his experience with the 1936 “Lady Macbeth affair”,  all too aware of those repressive conditions foisted upon creative artists within his homeland, and thus taking care with his first string quartet venture (1938) to avoid any undue excess. It was six years before he returned to the medium in 1944, confident then of giving an impression of a loyal Russian’s patriotic response to the war effort via his references in the work to Russian folk music, though the ethnic elements in this second quartet included definite references to Jewish “Klezmer” music, perhaps more for aesthetic reasons than political ones. The Third, Fourth and Fifth Quartets were less fortunate, with the composer’s increasingly dysfunctional relationship with Stalin and his cohorts resulting in his regarding the works as “for the drawer” – the Third Quartet (1946) received one performance before being withdrawn), while the other two (the 1949 Fourth and the 1952 Fifth)  languished unperformed until after Stalin’s death in 1953.

Of longer-term interest is Shostakovich’s love of the music of JS Bach – he headed a Soviet delegation in 1950  to attend in Leipzig events marking the bicentennial commemoration of Bach’s death , where he was quoted as saying “For us Bach’s legacy is an embodiment of flaming emotion, soulful humanity and true humanism, which stands in contrast to the dark world of raw evil and contempt for humanity.” Shostakovich knew the Well-Tempered Clavier intimately (he had been playing it from the age of twelve), when he encountered the 26 year-old Tatiana Nikolaeva playing selections from the work at the International Bach Competition which was one of the Leipzig bicentennial events. Her playing (which won her the competition’s first prize) inspired Shostakovich to compose his own set of 24 Preludes and Fugues, and dedicate the set to Nikolaeva, who premiered them in December of 1952 (she subsequently recorded them no less than three times!).

These Op.87 Preludes and Fugues provide a thoroughly refreshing look at musical examples of the art we readily associate with Bach – counterpoint, fugue and texture, a dynamic collection of captivating opportunities for what one commentator has described as “musical ecstasy and reflection”. And, as ‘cellist Rolf Gjelsten pointed out in his pre-concert talk today prior to playing for us Bach’s heart-warming ‘Cello Suite No.3 in C Major,  the work’s confidence, ebullience and mastery of form is a representation of the effect on Shostakovich’s own use of counterpoint and fugue in certain of his quartets, especially evident in the 1944 Fifth Quartet which we were to hear immediately after this work.

I’d recently been enjoying former Wellingtonian cellist Miranda Wilson’s “The Well-Tempered ‘Cello” (published 2022, Fairhaven Press) , describing her own saga of getting to know, working on, and eventually performing these ‘Cello Suites – so the section of the book devoted to this Third Suite occasioned some required (re)reading and (re)relishing!  She emphasises the work’s in-built resonances, being in the C-major key, and Rolf Gjelsten seemed to confirm this with his verdict regarding the work’s general affability and out-going nature – music with plenty to say and with the resonances created that supported this kind of character.

Right from that opening “downward plunge” into Bach’s flow of notes I felt a wonderful sense of well-being – the journey at first was mostly scalic, but with some wider steps and a couple of quirky jumps, and a voice which grows in variety of expression, passing through single notes, phrases, lines and episodes, and with an engagingly droll drone-sequence around the note of G, before a few moments of recitative bring us to the end.  The Allemande contrasts with the bright-and-bushy-tailed Prelude in being so gorgeously relaxed in its graceful trajectory, the sudden chain of double-stopped notes in the piece’s first half, a brief frisson of tension that resolves with a nudge of extra warmth. Rolf had told us about the Courante with its “crazy dance” aspect (Miranda Wilson refers to the piece’s “frantic-up-and-down arpeggios”!) – and to my untutored ear it seemed to possess and swap between two kinds of rhythmic trajectories at will, with beat-stresses changing as if playing a kind of game with my sensibilities!

The Sarabande, my attendant author’s “powerfully moving” rhythm, is similarly characterised by my in situ player as having “a unique kind of intensity” – I didn’t know before this concert that it’s a dance form that was banned in the 17th Century as eliciting “too erotic” a response from its participants! I’ve now been dangerously over-sensitised to its allure, and will have to watch myself over that second note in each bar, in future!  I catch myself savouring it during the performance, here, and thinking that it must be a case of “once heard, etc….!”

The Bourees plucked me our of any such fantasy world I might have ventured into. They’re wonderful, “two-sides to the coin” dances, suggesting different physical, psychological or emotional views of the same location, feeling, or situation. Here the difference seemed like a masculine/feminine distinction, a somewhat conventional response, I know, but one which a lifetime of observation has ingrained for good or ill! And I loved the Gigue, here, with its almost lazily loping stride, and especially the bariolage sections (one note repeatedly sounded in the midst of a whirl of others) which have always had a pleasantly astringent “ring”, and which were followed with a reassuring “that’s enough of that” rejoiner!

So, onto the first of the Shostakovich offerings of the afternoon we went, with the wind just as fulsomely attendant as ever! The Fifth String Quartet appropriately back-ended the Bach Suite performance, allowing the former’s compositional proximity to the composer’s own 24 Preludes and Fugues to resonate more readily, the earlier Second String Quartet having a rather different, and more removed kind of genesis. I was intrigued by other references I’d found to this later quartet’s influences, among them the music of one Galina Ustvolskaya, a former pupil of the composer’s and one he apparently harboured deeper feelings for, following the death of his first wife – Shostakovich quotes a four-note motif from Ustvolskaya’s B-flat Clarinet Trio, played by the first violin in the quartet’s first movement coda (the composer’s feelings, incidentally, were never returned, adding to the poignancy of the quote).

In his introduction to the work for us Rolf Gjelsten emphasised the composer’s predicament at having to indefinitely defer some of his music’s performances, such as this Quartet (along with his two previous quartets, one of which did get a “premiere” but was then withdrawn!). Stalin’s death in 1953 meant that this Quartet could at last come in from the cold, along with a number of other important works “awaiting their time”. It was the first of the composer’s Quartets which joined the movements together in a single sweep, and it contained a number of unusually “personal” references – elements which would come to increasingly characterise the quartets still to come.

The work’s striking opening contained a “walking” theme whose determined trajectories were set upon by trenchant figures whose intensities assailed the music until the second violin’s introduction of a more lyrical subject tossed about between the players. Gradually the mood intensified further, with both the walking and lyrical themes returning but under siege, the lines buzzing like fierce insects, out for blood, but then gradually receding as, firstly, the lyrical theme made an impassioned return, and then, from nowhere, came the aforementioned Ustvolskaya quote on the first violin, disappearing after a second, higher, more ethereal statement as the instrument took the music via a single note and accompanied by pizzicati, to the next movement.

Here, the lines portrayed a kind of stillness, a post-rampage desolation, in places a kind of austere beauty, with eerie unisons and soulful phrases clasping the ambiences and holding them fast, until the viola, obeying a lonely impulse stepped forwards with an engaging phrase in hand to begin the dance, a tart little waltz whose good-humoured gesturings gradually turned once more into the furies that beset the opening movement. And just as unexpectedly as in the opening movement, the tumult ceased, and first the violin, and then the viola impassionedly sounded the Ustvolskaya theme once again, punctuated by emphatic pizzicati from the others. As with its first appearance the theme gave little solace, more a sense of something out-of-reach, emphasised by the subsequent “walking away” of the music, the jog-trot of the finale’s opening leading to a bleaker, much reiterated theme which then dissolved into silence.

After giving us such a “living and breathing from within” response to this work’s emotionally searching sound-saga, the players allowed us an interval’s space before launching into the  stunningly contrasted physicality of the opening “Overture” to the composer’s Second String Quartet , written in 1944 – music sounding for the moment relatively free from the constraints of politics or dogmas, its folkishness serving both as Shostakovich’s loyal citizen-response to the “Great Patriotic War”, and in particular his fondness for Jewish klezmer-like idioms in the exuberant opening theme, here suggestive of a folk-celebration.

Though this remained an ensemble performance overall, throughout the work’s second movement I couldn’t help but be overwhelmed by the charismatic violin-playing of Helene Pohl in her delivery of the piece’s klezmer-like solo, mournfully expressive soliloquies over drone-like accompaniments, and with the occasional notes ambiently “bent” in what one presumes is an authentic style. At one point the ‘cello sounded a brief solo before the violin began a slow waltz, one into which melody the other instruments gradually climbed, their notes rising to agitatedly “connect” with the violin’s before falling away once more – for most of this movement the violin is played as if it has joined with its player at prayer…..

A nocturnal scherzo/waltz followed, swift, ghostly and chromatic, a real danse macabre, alternating between substance and shadow before taking its “do I wake or sleep?” leave.  In its enigmatic wake was left the finale, an astonishing theme-and-variations movement, recitative-like at the beginning between the instruments , settling down to expound and extract every ounce, strand and tone of the folk-tune introduced by the viola, and then refracted through what seemed like all possible combinations, and every single conceivable characteristic one might ascribe to the composer’s experience. All the players here – violinist Simeon Broom, violist Nicholas Hancox and cellist Rolf Gjelsten – brought into play intensities and virtuosities echoing those of Helene Pohl’s brought over from the previous movement, carrying the music through its tumultuous journey to a monumental conclusion.

I managed a few grateful words of breathless appreciation to Rolf Gjelsten at the end – and then, afterwards, the still-insistent winds were good company as I walked home, drawing out the music’s tumultuous resonances from my memory and setting them dancing in the open air, art and nature joining hands in an unexpected post-concert bonus!