Tag: chamber music

Maximum Minimalism – simple, state-of-the-art complexities from Stroma

Posted on by Alan Wells

STROMA: “MAXIMUM MINIMALISM”

Bridget Douglas (flutes), Patrick Barry (clarinet), Reuben Chin (saxophone), Jeremy Fitzsimons (percussion), Leonard Sakofsky (vibraphone), Emma Sayers (piano), Anna van der See , Rebecca Struthers (violins), Giles Francis (viola), Ken Ichinose(cello), Matthew Cave (contrabass), conducted by Mark Carter.

Steve Reich: Double Sextet (2007)

Alison Isadora: ALT (2017)

Julia Wolfe: Lick (1994)

Terry Riley: In C (1964)

City Gallery, Wellington,

Thursday, 19 October 2017

“Maximum Minimalism” was the wittily oxymoronic title for this concert by Wellington’s (New Zealand’s?) premiere contemporary music ensemble, Stroma. “Minimalism” was the name bestowed on a group of American composers who, in the 1960s, reacted against the forbidding complexity of atonal and serial music and began (largely independently of each other) employing the extended repetition of simple elements. Steve Reich, Philip Glass and Terry Riley were the pioneers (La Monte Young is sometimes included, but this is confusing, because his work explores indefinitely sustained sounds, tuned to ratios from the harmonic series, rather than rhythmic repetitions).

Steve Reich preferred the term “process music”. His early compositions were as rigorous in their way as anything in the preceding period of modernism: tapes which went gradually out of phase (Come Out, 1966), or chirping chords progressively lengthened until they became an oceanic swell (Four Organs, 1970). Later, he started making composerly interventions into these strict procedures. In Double Sextet the forward driving momentum was interrupted by slower chordal sections, and the whole piece included a slow movement. The live instrumentalists (flute, clarinet, violin, cello, vibraphone and piano) played with precision against a recorded version of themselves (hence the “Double”), producing a dense, busy texture. This, and the interaction between Emma Sayers’ high piano and the piquancy of Leonard Sakofsky’s vibraphone, created an edgy, astringent world of sound.

If Double Sextet represented late minimalism, Terry Riley’s In C stood right at the beginning. His approach was very different from Reich’s. Here the complex counterpoint was the result, not of careful calculation, but of giving the performers freedom progress through a series of short melodic fragments, each at their own pace. I was impressed by how these classically trained musicians handled the improvisatory elements. While there was no particular overall shape, Stroma created the dynamic ebb and flow that could be expected from experienced improvisers. There were even segments of long notes where the tempo seemed to slow down, despite the persisting pulse of the high C’s on piano and percussion.

American cross-genre composer Julia Wolfe’s Lick began with short, arresting phrases before the syncopated rhythms kicked in. Reuben Chin’s saxophone and Nick Granville’s electric guitar contributed to the jazz-rock ambience. Again I felt the absence of a clear overall structure, but was engaged by the well-paced contrasts of texture and rhythm.

For me, the highlight of a Stroma concert is often the premiere of a New Zealand work, and this was no exception. Victoria University graduate Alison Isadora has spent much of her life in The Netherlands, but maintains her connections with New Zealand, and held the 2016-17 Lilburn House Residency. Many of her compositions have involved mixed media, often with a political undertone (“agitator-prop”, perhaps – one piece included an onstage washing machine). Her recent scores have been more introverted however, the string quartet ALT notably so. Ethereal and understated, ALT wove its texture almost exclusively from string harmonics, sometimes near the top of musical pitch-perception. But its quietly seductive surface was underpinned by a well-formed musical structure, propelled to a subtle climax by a gentle pulse in the cello, before resolving into a sustained sense of suspended time. It could almost have merited a place in Stroma’s next concert (“Spectral Electric”, City Gallery, Thursday 16 November), which will be a tribute to the Spectralist composers who base their sonorities on the harmonic series: this will feature a new concerto by Michael Norris for Wellington’s own, Mongolian trained, throatsinger, Jonny Marks.

Viola Students from the New Zealand School of Music with diverting sampler of well-played pieces

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Viola pieces by Bach, Hoffmeister, Hindemith, Anthony Ritchie, Schumann and Rebecca Clarke

Violists: Debbie King, Georgia Steel, Grant Baker
Pianists: Catherine Norton, Matt Owen

St Andrew’s on The Terrace

Wednesday 18 October, 12:15 pm

Three violists and two pianists put this lunchtime programme together. Such student presentations always reveal music that one has never come across before, and the discoveries here – not the composers’ names, which one had a casual knowledge of – were of the pieces of music. A viola concerto by Anton Hoffmeister, a contemporary of Mozart, a character piece by Schumann, viola sonatas by Anthony Ritchie, Hindemith and Rebecca Clarke (all of which one should probably have known; none was played at the recent International Viola Congress in Wellington).

But it began with the Bach’s third cello suite, in C. Although one has become somewhat accustomed to other instruments purloining these great suites, the original version seems to become ever more deeply embedded in one’s consciousness, with the result that the cello’s nearest relative sounded – to me – just a little inauthentic. The intonation was good, but perhaps a certain lack of flexible articulation and bowing that was not quite as flawless as it might have been, detracted slightly. Debbie King chose the three fastest movements and managed pretty well, though the pair of Bourrées were more relaxed than the Gigue which might have been more engaging at a slower pace.

Georgia Steel, with Catherine Norton, chose to play the second and third movements from Franz Anton Hoffmeister viola concerto in D (another, in B flat also appears in the archive). A plaintive Adagio, with ornaments still in need of a bit more refinement, and the Rondo finale which was certainly of the Mozart generation without the beguiling charm and inspiration. However, the pair had absorbed the genuine idiom and made one conscious of a composer well worth watching out for.

Perhaps the most formidable of the pieces was Hindemith’s solo sonata, Op 25 No 1, of which Grant Baker played movements I, II and IV. The first, labelled Breit, ‘Broadly’, is unrelentingly severe, though it becomes more varied after a couple of minutes, evidently running without a pause into the second movement, ‘Very lively and strict’. It’s the fourth movement that is the show-piece, translated: ‘Furiously fast. Wild. Tonal beauty is secondary’; and Grant Baker did well.

Anthony Ritchie’s steadily growing corpus has become very imposing with music for a very wide range of instruments, genres and purposes. Here was Debbie King again, with pianist (I assume, Matt Oliver, though neither violist nor pianist was named). The piece was the Allegro tempestuoso (first movement) from the ‘Viola Concerto’, though the note explained that we were to hear Ritchie’s rewrite of the original concerto as a sonata for viola and piano. Ritchie’s music is always both interesting and approachable, as well as idiomatically composed to suit the intended performers. Debbie clearly found the music congenial as well as being in tune with the piano part; and the listener too found this a very engaging piece which strongly invited one to hear the other three movements.

Next came another first movement – ‘Nicht schnell’, from Schumann’s Märchenbilder (Op 113). Schumann didn’t invite the listener to try to conjure specific images to his fairytale pictures and nothing presented itself to my imagination. But Georgia Steel and Catherine Norton, again, fell easily into the spirit of these pieces written late in Schumann’s life when mental disabilities were starting to emerge. The brilliant inspiration of the pre-1840 piano works was gone gone.

Finally Grant Baker, with Catherine Norton played part of the viola sonata by British composer/violist Rebecca Clarke. I’d heard its first two movements at a St Andrew’s lunchtime concert back in 2010. Now we heard the third movement (Adagio – Allegro). It’s an attractive work, very much of its era, though not under the influence of atonality or undue abrasiveness. The piano part is as interesting as the viola’s, and Norton played with all her usual finesse and intuition. And the viola writing was far from routine; opening with a longish Adagio that subtly becomes more spirited and inventive.

As well as being an always rewarding impression of the nature of today’s student talent, this was a very interesting glimpse of the wide variety of diverting music for the viola.

Wilma Smith and Friends play fine programme for Wellington Chamber Music

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Wilma Smith (violin), Caroline Henbest (viola), Alexandra Partridge (cello), Andrew Leathwick (piano)

Piano quartets: William Walton’s in D minor; Andrew Leathwick’s No 1 and Brahms’s No 3 in C minor, Op 60

St Andrew’s on The Terrace

Sunday 15 October, 3 pm

We reviewed Wilma Smith and Friends at their Waikanae concert on 24 September. There they had played Beethoven’s not-much-played Op 16 piano quartet, Dvořák’s greatly loved Op 87 as well as the piano quartet by the group’s pianist, Leathwick.  I suppose I can wait till next August when I see that Wellington Chamber Music’s just announced 2018 Sunday series will hear the Dvořák played by the Leppänen, Thomson, Joyce, Irons quartet.

Wilma’s three colleagues, two of whom are New Zealanders, all have an association with the Australian National Academy of Music, in Canberra, while Wilma herself teaches at the two principal Melbourne universities.

This Wellington programme avoided playing anything too well-known: Brahms’s 3rd piano quartet is the least familiar of the three. Played here with such finesse and musicality that its relative neglect became hard to understand.

Walton’s 16-year-old creation
However, the concert began with a, to me, totally unknown quartet, by a 16-year-old William Walton. Though it might not display the brilliance and musical delights that Mendelssohn or Mozart were producing at that age, this was a very impressive achievement, even allowing for its getting revised much later in the composer’s life (when he was 72).

It was written in the last year of WWI and so might have reflected the Englishness of Bax or Ireland or Vaughan Williams, even Elgar. All I could say is that the music had a generalised English, as distinct from a Continental feel, and Herbert Howells’s own piano quartet has been offered as a possible influence. Would Walton have heard Bartók in 1918? something at the start of the last movement suggested it. It was too soon for the iconoclastic Walton of the Bloomsbury years to be audible anywhere, but there could have been touches of Ravel, for there was much in it of a surprising sophistication.

It began with a clear conception of certain melodic ideas that seemed authentic rather than arbitrary, and an understanding of the art of building music in a formal shape. It was indeed formal in having four movements –  a bright, positive opening, a scherzo that seemed singularly assured, then a calm Adagio in a nocturnal mood, with muted strings, and finally an energetic Allegro that might have attempted to emulate the radical composers of the Continent, even certain rhythmic elements from Eastern Europe (do I mean Bartók?though what was known of him in England in the First World War?).

Writing for the quartet as a whole was quite mature, and it was clear that the young composer had a refined appreciation of the characteristics of each instrument – a solo viola passage caught the ear. Music from the first movement returned in a natural-sounding was to bring it to an end.

Andrew Leathwick’s quartet
A quartet by the group’s pianist Andrew Leathwick, followed. He introduced it, but in rather too casual a way, without sufficient care for enunciation and for the rhythms of his speech to be easily followed. The music largely explained itself – an opening that was almost secretive, improvisatory, slowly awakening with long phrases carried high on the violin strings. The second movement, entitled ‘Freely’, began with muted violin and cautious piano notes and signs that the composer became aware of the need to retain the listener’s attention with an almost Dvořákian melody. The composer seemed sensitive to the particular character of each instrument, subtly varying colours and dynamics; the viola carried a vaguely familiar elegiac tune which I couldn’t attribute. The composer recorded that ‘the great Romantic composers’ had inspired the last movement – Con moto. Those influences were clear enough. The whole piece, written in an idiom (idioms?) of earlier music made me aware of the styles of music that music students now feel free to write, far removed from the strenuously avant-garde, ‘original-at-all-costs’, audience-alienating music that I used to subject myself to in my early years reviewing for The Evening Post in the late 80s and 90s.

The style adopted in this piece is now accepted in a more open and tolerant musical environment in music schools, though one naturally hopes that it will not discourage a freedom to explore more adventurous approaches that make judicious use of influences from the music of the recent past.

Rosemary Collier’s review of this piece will be found in the review of 24 September.

Brahms’s Piano Quartet No 3
The last piece was Brahms’s Piano Quartet No 3, Op 60.  As I noted above it’s not as well-known as the Op 25 quartet, or perhaps even as the second one. But here was a performance that did it credit. It launches itself in a distinctly C minor manner, commanding, weighty and serious minded, rather than seductive, first in the Adagio opening and then the Allegro non troppo main part. But it’s exactly what a paid-up Brahms-lover looks for; not what the censorious Schoenberg who orchestrated the Op 25 piece because he thought it too dense for chamber music, would have enjoyed at all.

For it is indeed almost symphonic in its textures although the quartet produced all the clarity that I needed. Though the second movement is more animated, it dwells in a similar  sound world, darkly impassioned, with energetic piano writing that Leathwick handled, though the piano lid was on the long stick, in excellent accord with the strings.

The third movement, Andante, opens with a soulful, though sanguine duet between piano and cello which offered Alexandra Partridge (and again the pianist) an admirable opportunity to be enjoyed. And the finale too confirmed that impression left from all that had gone before of a carefully studied approach in which the essence of Brahms had become thoroughly embedded. Rapport between strings and piano was always perfectly integrated in terms of balance and interpretive view.

It ended a very satisfying chamber music recital, offering a sound reason to take comfort in a cultural relationship with Australia.

 

 

A fine solo cello recital at St Andrew’s lunchtime concert

Posted on by Rosemary Collier

Inbal Megiddo, solo cello recital

Bach: Cello Suite no.2 in D minor, BWV 1008
Pigovat: Nigun
Hans Bottermund and Janos Starker: Paganini Variations

St. Andrew’s on The Terrace

Wednesday, 4 October 2017, 12.15 pm

A good-sized audience heard a memorable recital of advanced cello music in a varied repertoire.

Inbal Megiddo is an extremely accomplished cellist, who teaches the instrument at the New Zealand School of Music, and plays in the Te Koki Trio.

It was a pity that the programme notes gave no information about the works performed, because her spoken introductions were far too quiet to be heard in much of the church; even after Marjan van Waardenberg gave the musician a microphone, because it was held too far from her face.

The Bach was played absolutely splendidly, with lots of light and shade.  Strong fortissimos, pianissimos that were never weak but intense, subtlety of phrasing and very resonant playing throughout the dynamic range were all superb features.

However, it was a pity not to have the titles of the movements of the Suite printed in the programme; Google had to come to the rescue later; given their very different characters from one another, it was a shame the audience did not have the descriptions.

After the lively opening Prélude came the Allemande or German dance, and then Courante, or running dance, which in this performance was almost an Olympic sprint, but very exciting.  In contrast is the slow dance, the Sarabande, which originated in Spanish America.  Then came two Menuetts; parts of these and the Sarabande were very tender, with ornaments executed exquisitely.  The two differed from each other, and were followed by the Gigue final movement, which was very complex.

It all made up to an accomplished and satisfying whole.

Boris Pigovat is a Russian-born and educated Israeli composer.  Donald Maurice of NZSM has been a champion of his music, and has performed and recorded significant works by this composer.  On consulting Pigovat’s web-site, I found listed three versions of Nigun, for solo viola, solo violin and for string quartet – but not solo cello.  Wkipedia informs me that a “nigun or niggun (pl. niggunim) is a form of Jewish religious song or tune sung by groups. It is vocal music, often with repetitive sounds such as “bim-bim-bam.””

The piece (composed in 1996) opened with strong bass notes.  It incorporated some amazing techniques of fingering – playing the melody and the drone accompaniment at the same time; playing sul ponticello (on the bridge).  The work was demanding technically, with numerous different tonal effects.

The variations by Hans Bottermund and Janos Starker (both cellists) on Paganini’s theme was also an astonishingly complicated piece technically.  It was certainly brilliant, incorporating left-hand pizzicato in the first variation following the theme, then in the next, double-stopping.  The third was almost entirely made up of harmonics, i.e. the strings were not fully pressed down, but the natural harmonics to be found at various points on the strings are made to sound by lightly holding the fingers on them.  Another pizzicato movement followed, to be followed by a very fast variation.  Altogether, the work was a demonstration of a myriad of advanced cello techniques, and ended a recital that revealed what a fine cello and a thoroughly accomplished cellist could do, without any support from other instruments.

 

History and Geography in Music: Pipa player Wu Man and the NZSQ

Posted on by Jennifer Shennan

Wu Man (pipa) and the New Zealand String Quartet
Music by Tan Dun, Zhao Jiping and Zhao Lin, Tabea Squire and arrangements

St. Mary of the Angels

Thursday 28 September  2017, 7:30 pm

If you didn’t hear Kim Hill on RNZ Saturday on 23 September, go and listen to the online archive now. A poignant interview with Douglas Wright, New Zealand’s most compelling dancer / choreographer, is to be found there … as humane and considered a conversation about art as practised and life as lived that you could hope to find.

Alongside it sits Hill’s interview with Wu Man, the world’s leading player of pipa, traditional Chinese lute, and the inspiration for many contemporary composers who have contributed to the revival in popularity of the instrument. The petite and spirited Wu Man  featured in Yo Yo Ma’s film and project, The Music of Strangers, and she shares with him a sense of urgency about the need for communication between peoples in different parts of the world who see music as a way, possibly the best way, to explore what is different and distinct, and what his identical and shared, among us.

An insightful spoken introduction by Luo Hui recounted the planning and managing needed for a visit such as this, which has also included a workshop and masterclass lecture. The Confucius Institute and the New Zealand School of Music have done the yards, and Kim Hill’s interview will have lit the candle to result in a capacity audience.

From the programme note by Sally Jane Norman, NZSM’s director: “In addition to her legendary musicianship, Wu Man’s commitment to cross-cultural communication resonates with the vibrant legacy established by Jack Body, central to our Asia Pacific identity”. It seemed only logical to pass to Wu Man a copy of the book Jack! celebrating composer Jack Body that Steele Roberts generously published, just before we lost our dear friend and colleague in 2015. (That ‘and’ is problematic when talking about Jack. If you were his colleague you were his friend. If you were his friend you were his colleague…perhaps ‘and’ should be ‘equals’).

The programme opened with two solos, traditional pieces for pipa, Flute and Drum Music at Sunset, exquisitely and accurately titled as the percussive effects of this instrument were shown to equal the melodic. White Snow in Spring is a Chinese echo to Le Sacre du Printemps that combined the promise of new season with wild storms demanding sacrifice. Butterfly Love, for pipa and string quartet, used the folk and opera musics from Wu Man’s hometown, Hangzhou. Such practice appealed very much to Chinese composers in 1960 – 1980, and here it was shaped into concerto form. It is by now clear from Wu Man’s playing that the pipa demands virtuosity of the highest order yet can also whisper the quietest secrets.

A movement from Chimaera for violin and pipa, was a lively and adventurous work by Wellington composer Tabea Squire. It was given a spirited introduction and then spunky performance by Monique Lapins together with Wu Man who keeps clarity within a shimmering dexterity. (I’d have been glad to see composition dates included on the otherwise excellent printed programme).

Red Lantern for Pipa and String Quartet was derived from the original score for the film Raise the Red Lantern by composer Zhao Jiping, here adapted by him and his composer-son, Zhao Lin. There were  narrative-cum-poetic moods in its five sections – Prelude moonlight, Wandering, Love, Death, Epilogue. About all there is really.

The second half of the concert opened with the string quartet Eight Colours by Tan Dun, from 1986, which he describes as “almost like a set of brush paintings … with timbre and actual string techniques developed from the Peking Opera… finding in it a way to mingle old materials from my culture with the new …”.

The final work, Concerto for String Quartet and Pipa, again  by Tan Dun,  makes demands of many sorts –  percussive, lyrical, and vocal – of the performers and they rise to and relish that fully. A great deal of rhythmic movement and expressive gesture is delivered so you might say that these musicians are dancing… but they are now seasoned performers sharing the stage with Royal New Zealand ballet dancers, so why not?

In the restored and beautiful St. Mary of the Angels church, the capacity audience gave a standing ovation for a programme of exquisite music from long ago, far away, as well as right now, right here. Radio New Zealand was recording, bless them. Tell me I’m breathless and using too many superlatives. Who cares? It’s the truth.

As I wrote this review Kim Hill was interviewing an inspirational school teacher (I think he later became Dean of Arts at University of Auckland) but basically History and Geography were his classroom subjects.  He’d have loved this concert because those subjects were effectively its theme.

Another end-of-year student recital: woodwinds in calm weather

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Old Saint Paul’s lunchtime concert

New Zealand School of Music wind players
Annabel Lovatt, Harim Oh, Samantha McSweeney, Breanna Abbott, Darcy Snell, Leah Thomas

Music by Mozart, Tchaikovsky, Hindemith, Weber, Britten

Old Saint Paul’s

Tuesday 26 September, 12:15 pm

End of year public recitals by New Zealand School of Music students continued, today with woodwind players. If I had been uninterested in hearing the NZSO and Freddy Kempf last Saturday playing single movements of major piano concertos (though I gather it was well-patronised), this was different. Because one was not laying out a substantial ticket price for the rather frustrating experience of being left in mid-air in Mozart and Rachmaninov, or coming in for the dessert after missing the substantial and wonderful first and second courses (in the case of the Mendelssohn).

But the Mozart oboe quartet had other very strong associations for me, for back in 1977 I’d taken long-service leave from my Public Service career and we criss-crossed France by car in the company of a few cassettes, one of which contained Mozart’s clarinet quintet and oboe quartet. The associations remain vivid, and they support powerfully excessive passions for both that music and France. And I have to say that Annabel Lovatt’s paying of its first movement, recreated the delights that I’d experienced 40 years ago. It was on the quick side, but her handling of the entrancing melody was beautiful, and the undulations of breathings and tempi were charming. (and yes, I’d have loved to have heard her play the other movements!).

Harim Oh played an arrangement of the March from Act I of the Nutcracker, a rather transformational shift from exultant brass to clarinet, with melodic modifications. But in its own right, this was an entertaining version, and Oh played it with vivacity and sensitivity, along with Hugh McMillan’s piano standing in splendidly for the rest of the orchestra.

Next, the flute, and this time a piece I was not familiar with: Hindmith’s sonata, the first movement. It was written in 1936, just before the composer decided that he had to quit Nazi Germany for the United States; it was the first, I think, of a total of 26 sonatas for piano and almost any instrument you can name. In a blind-fold test, I’m not sure Hindemith would have been my first guess, though I’d have got the era right! But of course, it emerged typically Hindemith: spirited, matter-of-fact, melodically clear but never sentimental. And Samantha McSweeney coped with its quite demanding challenges with a technique that was pretty well up to it and with a good feeling for its essential musicality.

We heard movements from two of Weber’s several concertos; the bassoon one is certainly less familiar than the clarinet concertino and the first clarinet concerto that we heard at the end. Breanna Abbott gave us a very pithy summary of its place in music history: it was 206 years old, she said. In spite of a wee stumble, she played it interestingly, and bravely, for Weber was always concerned to provide music both for his own piano performance and for other instruments that was strong on virtuosic display.

Darcy Snell played a solo oboe piece, Pan, from Benjamin Britten’s Six Metamorphoses after Ovid, offering a quick run-down on classical literature – Ovid’s Metamorphoses has been the source of a huge quantity of classically-inspired literature from the Middle Ages to the present. (A perfectly senseless aside: Ovid was sent into exile by the Emperor Augustus, for unknown reasons, and died at Constanța on the Black Sea coast, now Romania; it has a theatre called Teatrul Ovidiu – have long hankered to go there).

Anyway, this solo oboe piece emerged as meditative, somewhat shy, even hesitant, though one is hard-pressed to divine anything ‘classical’ about it. Darcy played it in a nicely considered manner, and it ended in a typically Brittenish, droll and unusual way with a sort of unresolved trill.

Finally Weber’s first clarinet concerto, second movement. Leah Thomas played it with Hugh McMillan, who’d been the able and supportive associate pianist throughout. The slow movement, in F minor, is of a meditative, perhaps sad character, suggestive of an operatic aria style, with a livelier middle section featuring a lot of showy arpeggios.

One always hopes that performances like these, that give such very enticing tastes of great pieces of music, will inspire the devoted audiences, if they don’t known them, to hunt the music down and listen to the whole works – and be surprised that all the other movements are just as beautiful.

It was the last of the Old Saint Paul’s 2017 lunchtime series.

 

Premiere at Waikanae of composition by pianist Andrew Leathwick

Posted on by Rosemary Collier

Waikanae Music Society
Wilma and Friends (Wilma Smith, violin; Caroline Herbert, viola; Alexandra Partridge, cello; Andrew Leathwick, piano)

Beethoven: Piano Quartet in Eb, Op.16
Andrew Leathwick: Piano Quartet no.1
Dvořák: Piano Quartet no.2 in Eb, Op.87

Waikanae Memorial Hall

Sunday 24 September 2017, 2.30pm

This was the first concert in an eleven-centre tour by Wilma and Friends – two of the friends are New Zealanders: Alexandra Partridge from the Kapiti Coast and Andrew Leathwick who studied at the University of Waikato, both of whom have since studied at the Australian Academy of Music in Melbourne.  It is always a great pleasure to welcome home violinist Wilma Smith, and to hear her winsome tones again.  Caroline Herbert studied at the Yehudi Menuhin School and the Guildhall School of Music in England.  She is now Principal Viola with the Australian Chamber Orchestra.

The two younger members of the ensemble chose to use electronic iPads rather than paper sheet music for their scores.  This had consequences: Alexandra Partridge had difficulty several times with her music stand partially collapsing under the weight of the device – not the first time I have seen problems in concerts through the use of these devices.

It took a few minutes into the first work for the players to ‘jell’ as an ensemble (this was the first concert on their tour), but once it happened their cohesion was permanent.

The early Beethoven piano quartet was an ebullient work, featuring lovely interplay between the instruments in the first movement, after its grave beginning.  The allegro ma non troppo was followed be an andante cantabile slow movement.  It was mellifluous and smooth, with a touch of melancholy.  The players were in complete accord with each other; I was particularly aware of Andrew Leathwick’s pianism – sensitive, robust when required, with am excellent but undemonstrative technique.  A gorgeous viola solo was a feature of this movement, as was the quiet, dreamy conclusion.

The Rondo finale (allegro ma non troppo)  had plenty of fast finger work for the pianist.  The whole was an uncomplicated three-movement work, mainly in jubilant mood, revealing the excellent balance between the players.

First Wilma and then Andrew gave brief introductions to the latter’s composition, which came about from a more-or-less chance meeting between the two.  Leathwick was modest about his composition, commissioned by Wilma Smith.  This performance was its première.

The first movement was marked lento – larghetto.  A sotto voce, rather spooky beginning on strings led to a more spirited, even agitated louder section.  Each of the strings got its own attractive solo.  Then mutes were used, to end the movement softly.

The second movement, marked ‘freely’, started with a beautiful folk-like violin solo, followed by cello, again with a folksy melody, but different in character.  The other instruments joined in, with embellished repetition of the themes.  Then the piano played a skittish dance, accompanied by pizzicato and bowed strings.  A muted section followed, with decorations on the piano of the themes that the strings played.

The con moto third movement had a busy opening with piano leading against repeated motifs from the strings.  It demonstrated what a very fine pianist Leathwick is.  A muted violin solo followed a splendid utterance from the cello.  The piano then played bravura passages in the style of a late Romantic-era piano concerto (the programme note referred to ‘links with Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninov and Prokofiev).  Then there was a romantic theme from the strings, before a grand ending.

Everyone I spoke to in the interval had enjoyed Leathwick’s composition.  How often has one heard that after a first performance of a contemporary composition?  I could not help thinking ‘This was not minimalist, it was maximalist!’  Its composer deserves congratulations for his fluent, interesting and musically attractive work.

Dvořák’s chamber music is almost universally delightfully cheerful and pleasing. This quartet was first performed in 1890, in Frankfurt.  The programme note said that the composer ‘…weaves together wit, power, sweetness, and passion with inimitable sincerity’.  The quartet opened boldly, the allegro con fuoco becoming mellow as it proceeded.  It turned to strife, and agitated, angular passages; however the previous theme returned and was accompanied by staccato gasps.  Next to return was the calm and mellow theme.  Modulating through a bunch of keys, the music moves to a passage of gentle flourishes, only to end with a bold statement of the main theme.

The lento movement introduced one of the composer’s splendid cello themes, sonorously played by Alexandra Partridge against pizzicato strings and gentle piano.  Then things got more heated, with rapid passages on the piano and dynamic displays on the strings.  Calmness resumed once more with the cello leading melodically.  Agitation again, led by the piano, prefaced a meditative close.

The third movement (allegro moderato, grazioso) was a dance, led by Bohemian folk-dancers – joyous and thoughtful by turns.  A second dance followed, in dotted rhythm, and became more spirited than the first one.  There were some brilliant passages for piano, leading to a slower dance.

The finale (allegro ma non troppo) commenced in exciting, rapid manner.  Jolly melodies alternated with insouciant passages, ingratiating with their blend of humour and wistfulness.  A helter-skelter of motifs was interrupted by graceful short solos for each instrument.  The movement was bouncy and jovial to the end.

This was great playing.  All members of the ensemble played with the required degrees of finesse and boldness.  From the piano I never once detected the sustaining pedal; this was accomplished pianism.  We were all grateful to Wilma Smith for bringing such an outstanding group of young players, and wish them well for their future careers – and of course to her for bringing her own special qualities.

 

NZSM students give insightful performances of New Zealand music and pieces by Haydn, Beethoven, Brahms and Barber

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Lunchtime concert at Old St Paul’s

Piano students and a violinist from the New Zealand School of Music
Amanda Bunting, Matthew Oliver, Claudia Tarrant-Matthews (also, violin) and Sophie Tarrant-Matthews

Music by Beethoven, Barber, Psathas, Haydn, Brahms, Lilburn

Old St Paul’s

Tuesday 12 September 12:15 pm

We’ve been neglecting Old St Paul’s lunchtime concerts this year, and so I was glad to find a good audience for this varied exhibition of NZSM piano talent.

It began with Amanda Bunting who played two pieces: the first movement of Beethoven’s Tempest sonata (Op 31 No 2) and Samuel Barber’s Excursions, first movement. Though the Tempest is obviously still a work in progress, with quite a lot of slips, there remained an underlying understanding of its vigorous, shall we say, masculine character, both in its expostulatory and its equally masculine quality of sensitivity.

Then her playing of the first movement, Un poco allegro, of Samuel Barber’s Excursions, one of his best known piano pieces. It’s in four movements and might well be called a suite or even a sonata. Here was a better prepared and executed performance, dealing carefully with the sharp dynamic shifts and capturing the mid-century mood and moderate modernism of composers who had not succumbed to the pressures of serialism.  Its character reminds me, curiously, of one of John Psathas’s early pieces, Waiting for the Aeroplane which of course is quite irrelevant to one’s impressions of this performance.

The next pianist was Matthew Oliver who did, in fact play a couple of pieces by Psathas; the first and third movements from his Songs for Simon for piano and tape. There were problems with the tape, with both the apparent source and quality of the sound, and its intended relationship with the piano. I could detect little connection between what the piano was doing and what seemed to be unrelated sounds from the tape. The tape was hardly audible in the first section, His Second Time; but it was clearly intended to be more dominant in Demonic Thesis. Right at its beginning, the tape problem was again obvious and simply became a distraction; Oliver might better have settled for the piano part alone which was attractive, energetic and repetitive, in a jazz-influenced sense; and he played with energy, intelligence and insight.

While its accompaniment occasionally gave hints of what Psathas had intended, a process of mentally isolating of the piano part yielded music that was inventive and enjoyable. As one does these days, I listened to a YouTube recording by Donald Nicolson in order to get a proper impression of the piece that I regret that I hadn’t heard before: particularly the way the taped percussion sounds were integrated as intended with the piano. It deserves to be better known, and I look forward to a more technically successful performance.

Two sisters, Claudia and Sophie Tarrant-Matthews completed the recital. Claudia played first, the Presto, first movement of Haydn’s Sonata in E minor, Hob XVI/34. Her handling of the sonata was most accomplished, its tempo swift and fluent, the dynamic variety and subtleties understood and vividly expressed; the quiet wit that lies within most of Haydn’s music was conspicuous.

Then she played the first two of Brahms’s four Ballades Op 10. I have always found these strangely enigmatic in terms of their rhythmic and melodic intentions, and it’s never a good idea to attempt to give such characteristics certainty; she didn’t, and it was a satisfying performance. The second Ballade is more sunny and limpid in tone, and the performance again suggested that Claudia wasn’t seeking to solve its problems, to produce a definitive performance; as with so much Brahms, this is the way his music makes its impact and holds the attention. Technically, her playing was highly competent.

Lilburn’s third sonata for violin and piano
I have followed the careers of the two sisters with interest over the years: both have achieved distinction in both piano and violin. Sophie Tarrant-Matthews then introduced Lilburn’s Sonata for Violin and Piano in B minor, composed in 1950. I was sitting a few rows back and could not hear much of what she said, which might have included some of the following background.

This Lilburn violin sonata in B minor was actually his third, and so should be listed either as No 3, or defined by its key. Though the two sonatas, in E flat and C, of 1943 are relatively youthful works (well, he was 27 or 28), they are not insignificant; in fact, they are both around ten minutes longer than the B minor one. The ‘date’ test doesn’t consign to ‘insignificance’, other much played pieces such as the Drysdale, Aotearoa and Festival overtures, Landfall in Unknown Seas and the Canzonetta for violin and viola, all written before 1943.

There have been many recordings of the B minor sonata, perhaps most recently, together with the two 1943 sonatas, by Justine Cormack and Michael Houstoun. (see the list of earlier recordings in Peter Mechen’s review of 14 September 2011, of the recording by Elizabeth Holowell and Dean Sky-Lucas). The 1943 sonatas were first performed, respectively, by, Vivien Dixon (violin) and Anthea Harley Slack (piano), and Maurice Clare (violin) and Noel Newson (piano). The B minor sonata was written in 1950 for Frederick Page (pianist and head of the music department of Victoria University College) and violinist Ruth Pearl, after Lilburn had become a lecturer at the university; they premiered it at the university and then played it again three months later in Wigmore Hall in London.

As Sophie spoke, Claudia dispensed with her piano hands and reached for her violin, and her sister sat at the piano, which of course contributes much more than mere accompaniment to the work. To hear playing of such a finely integrated work by two sisters with years of experience playing together, was very interesting. The affinity between two who obviously enjoy a close musical rapport has developed over many years, to the point where they almost think and feel as one: with an intimately shared view of the character and shape of the music, and grasp of its melodic characteristics.

It’s in one movement, consisting of several contrasting phases, which are not distinct enough to be considered ‘movements’. For the record, the sections are marked: Molto moderato; Allegro; Tempo primo, largamente; Allegro; Allargando and Tempo I, tranquillamente; which returns the music to the home key of B minor.  The parts are conspicuous enough on the page, but the shifts in both tempo and tonality are so organically natural, and handled with such finesse that they clearly form parts of a carefully composed whole. Not only were the slow parts invested with a mature contemplative quality, but the Allegro sections were executed with strength and real conviction. The typical Lilburn spirit lies in the way the energetic B flat Allegro section subsides towards the end to return to the calm of the opening Molto moderato.

 

Playing with fire – music that sears and burns, from the New Zealand String Quartet

Posted on by Peter Mechen

The NZSQ’s Dangerous Liasions Tour 2017 – programme 2 (Wellington)
JANACEK – String Quartet No.2 “Intimate Letters”
JACK BODY – Saetas
MENDELSSOHN – String Quartet No.2 in A Minor Op.13

Helene Pohl, Monique Lapins (violins)
Gillian Ansell (viola), Rolf Gjelsten (‘cello)

Hunter Council Chamber, Victoria University of Wellington

Sunday, 10th September, 2017

The NZSQ’s 30th anniversary “Dangerous Liasons” national tour featured two programmes of works which encapsulated so much of what the ensemble has already achieved throughout its existence, including world-class presentations of some of the core string quartet repertoire, both in concert and on recordings, and an on-going committment to New Zealand music. Works by Beethoven, Bartok, Schumann and Mendelssohn have been given much-acclaimed performances in all parts of the country, and recordings of complete cycles of quartets by Bartok and Mendelssohn have internationally enhanced the group’s reputation. I would truly welcome a completed recorded cycle by the group of the Beethoven Quartets, to parallel Michael Houstoun’s already-completed recordings of the composer’s piano sonatas, for the sake of directly preserving the sheer quality of an achievement we’ve similarly acclaimed.

I thought that I’d previously encountered the first of Leos Janacek’s two string quartets as performed by the NZSQ at some stage – but a search of Middle C failed to turn up a review. Though I couldn’t specifically recall a previous hearing of either of the quartets I knew what to expect from the composer, having been variously excited and bewildered by my first encounters with his music (the Sinfonietta, plus a rhapsodic and volatile orchestral work called Taras Bulba), and sufficiently engaged by it all to explore further – piano pieces (Along an Overgrown Path, In the Mist), chamber works (Capriccio, Concertino) and opera (The Cunning Little Vixen).

Janacek (1854-1928), a native of Moravia, was one of music’s most remarkable “late bloomers”, producing in his 60s and 70s most of the works that would carry his name throughout the twentieth century and into the present day as one of the most original and innovative composers of his time. At an age when most people had long since sowed their wild oats and settled down to enjoy what has endured in their lives and would “see them out”, Janacek was experiencing a remarkable renaissance of activity and emotion normally associated with people in their twenties, through meeting a married woman, Kamila Stösslová, 37 years his junior, and falling deeply in love with her.

Both Janacek’s wife and Kamila’s husband “tolerated” the affair, largely because Kamila, though flattered by Janacek’s attentions, seemed outwardly unresponsive, as well as showing little interest in his music. But the composer was undeterred, writing hundreds of letters to her of a passionate and at times intimate nature. Kamila was obviously the driving force for his rejuvenated creativity, even if Janacek was to specifically enshrine his affair with her in just one particular work, his Second String Quartet “Intimate Letters”, writing to her and telling her that the music represented “all the dear things that we’ve experienced together”, and adding, “You stand behind every note, you, living, forceful, loving”.

The NZSQ’s ‘cellist, Rolf Gjelsten introduced the work for us at this afternoon’s concert, quoting another passage from Janacek’s writings to Stösslová, which referred to the Quartet’s music as having been “carved out of human flesh”. The words seemed to make for the composer the ultimate claim on the woman that he loved, to thus write her into his music.

Surely the music that followed was a portrait not of Stösslová per se, but of Janacek himself, and his projected emotions towards his paramour – everything that came after the striving, heartfelt opening declamation was sounded impulse, here whispered intensity, and there obsessive ostinati-like passages, the fulsomeness of the gestures heightened by extremities of dynamics and “unvarnished” string timbres. Lyrical sequences found themselves suddenly grappling with heightened, overbearing figurations, or with gradually sharpening focus, an extended solo for Monique Lapins’ violin arching at one point into intensely passionate exchanges which threatened to become orgasmic in places – a beautiful viola solo from Gillian Ansell similarly succumbed to the pull of the cataclysmic surges, swallowed and digested by the music’s ongoing default-setting intensities.

These descriptions, of course, stem directly from the NZSQ’s fiercely-committed playing as much as from the composer’s music – having heard and seen the ensemble perform many times over the years I’ve come to expect a kind of base-line intensity brought to whatever they play, which invariably makes for thrilling results – here, it seemed to me that Janacek’s creative spirit had been spontaneously re-ignited in performance, engulfing us in a veritable tide of raw emotion , which was surely what the composer intended! To similarly anatomise the way the NZSQ delivered the remaining movements of the Janacek would be to go overboard in terms of review space and reader time – enough to say that the second movement took us on a rhapsodically obsessive roller-coaster ride, Janacek subjecting the opening viola melody to all kinds of expressive extremes, rather like a manic lover reiterating the same words in endlessly inventive ways. The third movement, too, opened with melancholic declamations and easeful rhythmic trajectories which soon found themselves under siege from extremes of rhythm and timbral projection, Helene Pohl’s violin emoting almost to stratospheric breaking-point over several anguished sequences!

The finale’s near-manic folk-dance opening had an almost nightmarish gaiety, the atmosphere to all and intents and purposes “spooked” by what had gone before and its still-to-come possibilities. What incredible energy and focus these players seemed to draw on, to put across what seemed like a barrage of unsolicited chunks of reconstituted emotion! Whatever dancings that were left were punctuated with feral, animal-like scamperings and frighteningly vicious tremolandi – T.S.Eliot wrote somewhere that “human kind cannot bear very much reality”, and it seemed to me that these musicians had taken us perilously near to something like those realms of disturbance and disintegration via this extraordinary music.

After cheek-by-jowling with these full frontal intensities one wanted something removed from such hot-house emotions – Jack Body’s Saetas, while no less focused and involved with its subject matter, seemed to signal a throwing open of windows to let in air and light, following on as it did from Janacek’s somewhat claustrophobic series of confessional outpourings.

Gillian Ansell introduced us to Body’s work, which was commissioned by the Quartet as long ago as 2002, and which had come from the composer’s explorations of music associated with the Spanish flamenco tradition. Body had been researching material for a work, Carmen Dances, whose central character was the then iconic Wellington-based figure of Carmen Rupe, a transexual strip-club owner, who had also run as a mayoral candidate. Saetas (a word meaning “arrow” or “dart”) was composed as a separate project, with Body focusing particularly on music associated with religious feasts held in Spain during Holy Week – saeta are semi-improvised, highly ornamented flamenco songs, many of which were transcribed from different sources by the composer for his material.

Gillian Ansell talked about the quejío, or lament, aspect of these songs, sung by penitents as statues of Jesus and the Virgin Mary are carried through the streets in the processionals. The first and last pieces featured the musicians exclaiming such a cry of lament at the very beginning. As well, in the opening bars of the first piece the composer quoted excerpts from both Tchaikovsky’s “Pathetique” Symphony, and a Hugo Wolf song from his work “The Spanish Songbook”, which, together with the quejío constituted a kind of effervescing “cocktail mix” of diverse but still intensely-focused emotion in line with the fervour normally generated by the occasion.

Body’s transcriptions also featured strong drum pulses, which were here represented by additional instruments in the performance, a drum and an accordion, played by Rolf Gjelsten, who demonstrated to us aspects of what these instruments would sound like before the group began the work. After playing the ‘cello during the first piece, he swopped instruments, taking up the accordion for the remaining three pieces.

The upward-rushing figurations at the music’s beginning actually made me think of Wagner as much as Tchaikovsky! The lyrical declamations were played “folkishly”, the instruments readily exploring timbres associated with raw, direct emotion, characterful and unvarnished. Most of the music moved slowly and processionally, a dirge of tightly-knit intensities (the violins directed to play as if their notes were “searing beams of light”), both focused and atmospheric!

Rolf Gjelsten having swapped his instruments, the second saeta began, with single jabbed staccato notes to which the viola replied with a sombre melodic line, the accordion adding its harmonium-like tones besides contributing a rhythmic “crunching” accompaniment, viola and violins repeating the mournful thematic material in different registers. The third movement’s source material is not strictly a saeta (rather, a fourteenth century song “O sad life of the flesh!”) but the subject and general mood of the piece certainly accorded with the rest, and began with a quejio which linked it to the tradition. We heard dense clusters of accordion notes at the outset vying with flurrying string rhythms, which begin to alternate gypsy-like running figures and searing single held notes – gradually the piece’s agitations and divergent threads were bound together, the strings playing in unison at the end over a long-breathed accordion figure.

The fourth and last Saeta opened with another vocalisation (marked “with anguished fervour”) from the quartet players, reinforced by drum-and footbeats in a great “Bolero-like” crescendo to the final thunderous thump immediately after the strings finished their lines and reached their cadence. Leading up to this cataclysm were swirling maelstroms of sound from the instruments, creating an overwhelming effect of a specific, yet universally human kind of life-force.

In my mind arose the question – was Mendelssohn’s music going to make any impression upon us in cheek-by-jowl company with such raw extrusions of attention-grabbing emotion? Ought his contribution to the evening’s music have been put in a less assailable comparative position in relation to the rest? Well, in a concert of surprises this music’s ability to hold its ground and create its own culture of intense feeling was among my afternoon’s most noteworthy discoveries.

The NZSQ has, of course not long since completed a recording project for Naxos involving the composer’s complete works in this genre, a venture I’ve yet to catch up with – but on the basis of what I heard the players do with this particular quartet (No.2 in A Minor, Op.13), I would be very keen to seek their recordings out, and get to know the music better, especially so when, as here at this concert, it’s presented in what seems to me the best possible light. Having encountered such playing and interpretation of this order “live”, I would want to encourage as many people as possible to explore more of Mendelssohn via the efforts of the NZSQ on their recordings.

Monique Lapins, the ensemble’s second violinist, introduced the work, which was actually Mendelssohn’s first “mature” string quartet (composed in 1827) despite its later Opus number than the so-called String Quartet No.1 in E-flat Major, Op.12 (written two years AFTER No.2! – classical music would, of course, be the poorer without such mind-tickling anomalies!). She quoted the words of a song “Frage”, written and composed by the precocious 18-year-old during the same year as the “second” quartet, a song whose opening words “Is it true?” appear throughout the quartet as a three-note motif (incidentally, both Liszt and Brahms used a similar 3-note phrase, each in a solo piano work).

A slow, richly-voiced introduction began the Quartet’s performance of the work, the three-note motif derived from the song occurring at the end of the opening paragraph, just prior to the players’ precipitous plunge into the movement’s allegro, during which I readily took in the playing’s strength and gutsiness, imbuing the music with a greater and more satisfying degree of those qualities than I would have expected. After some intense duetting between the first and second violins in the development, the reprise brought back those first urgencies, engaging our sensibilites at a white-heat rate which again I found exhilarating.

The slow movement’s rich, hymn-like melody, so very characteristic of the composer, came with surety and strength in performance. The mid-movement fugue, modelled after Beethoven’s example in the latter’s Op.95 (despite his father’s disapproval, the young Felix idolised Beethoven’s quartets), was put through its somewhat volatile, though always characterful, paces by the players before the lovely return of the hymn-like opening music, at the movement’s end.

I loved the limpid poise and gossamer grace of the third-movement Intermezzo, a dance that was a kind of antique gavotte at the outset, replete with lovely instrumental interchanges and dovetailed melodic figures. A scherzo-like change which came over the music brought deft, rhythmically ambiguous gossamer scamperings in a kind of “hide-and-seek” scenario, almost Schumannesque in its “merry pranks” aspect, before the music returned to the opening solemnities – a coda glanced fleetingly and mischievously back at the “merry pranks” episode before smiling, and disappearing!

Not unlike what Schubert does at the beginning of his Octet’s finale, Mendelssohn presented us with chaos and disorder in a tempestuous opening, the first violin beating its breast over agitations wrought by the tremolo accompaniments . However, Mendelssohn’s ensuing allegro wasn’t as genial as Schubert’s, the NZSQ players here pushing expectantly towards points of intensity with exciting unisons and horse-galloping sequences. Gillian Ansell’s viola called for clear-headedness by revoicing the fugato of the second movement, but soon became caught up with the ensemble’s rebuilding of the lines towards a return of the allegro and thence to the movement’s tremulous opening. Keeping us on the seat’s edge, the composer fetched up a disconsolate solo, sung with oceans of feeling by Helene Pohl’s volin, quoting the fugato before taking final refuge with the others in the quartet’s opening – and the requoting of Mendelsson’s three-note figure was like balm for the soul! – it was caressed and embraced by the players, to the point where we in the audience were made to feel as if we ourselves were young lovers all over again! – a treasurable experience!

Pleasure of a “return to our lives” kind was then afforded by the players doing a “swop-around of instruments for a klezmer encore, written, I think, by Ross Harris, Rolf Gjelsten back on the accordion, and Helene Pohl in the ‘cellist’s seat for a change, while Gillian Ansell and Monique Lapins also did an exchange – wot larks! No more madcap scenario was evoked, and no enjoyment was more relished than by these talented musicians sharing their fun and games with us, and afterwards, sending us home replete!

Dangerous liaisons investigated by New Zealand String Quartet in restored St Mary’s

Posted on by Rosemary Collier

New Zealand String Quartet (Helene Pohl and Monique Lapins violins; Gillian Ansell, viola; Rolf Gjelsten, cello)

Beethoven: String Quartet no.1 in F, Op.18 no.1
Bartók: String Quartet no.1 in A minor, Sz.40
Schumann: String Quartet in A, Op.41 no.3

St. Mary of the Angels Church

Thursday, 7 September 2017, 7.30pm

This year, the Quartet’s tour was entitled ‘Dangerous Liaisons’, and introductory remarks explained how this epithet applied to each of the three composers whose early compositions in the genre the items were.

It was a robust and demanding programme heard by a rather modest audience.  Two little deficiencies for me: the lights were switched off entirely, save for the spotlights on the players (more of that later), and thus one could not refer to the programme during the concert; secondly, the printed programme did not carry the tempo designations of the movements.  The latter are always useful to know.  However, the spoken introductions were valuable, especially the longer one, with many musical examples, given by Helene Pohl for the Bartók..

The acoustic of the beautifully refurbished St. Mary of the Angels church is eminently suitable for chamber music, and it was good to hear all the subtleties; these can be lost in a bigger venue.  Every nuance was present in the Beethoven quartet; there was nothing mechanical about this playing.  The grand gestures of the first movement (allegro con brio) were interrupted by gentler passages.

The second movement adagio affetuoso ed appassionato, was influenced, the composer said, by the final, tragic scene in Romeo and Juliet – the ‘dangerous liaison’.  The solemn opening set the scene; towards the end the music had hints of yearning.  The beautifully expressive playing could be heard so well in the church,  Gorgeous lilting passages were followed by highly dramatic ones.

The scherzo third movement was a great contrast, being quite jolly in nature, driving ever onward.  The allegro final movement began in similar mood to the third, though it was a little more serious.  Counterpoint abounded.  Despite this quartet being one of the composer’s first, it was very assured.  Its close was flourishing and satisfying.

From early Beethoven (despite his quartet being numbered as no.1, apparently it was not the first, the numbering not being strictly chronological) to Bartók’s first composition in this genre.   The quartet is in three movements, played without breaks between.

A doleful introduction to the lento first movement evolved into more dramatic music, reflecting the composer’s unrequited love for the violinist Stefi Geyer, who broke off their relationship (another ‘dangerous liaison’).  Many different elements are present, but all the music was played in the same committed, unified way.  There are numerous passages where the violins play together, then the lower strings follow.  Concerted episodes abound also, including impassioned ones.

The second movement is marked allegretto (sometimes referred to as poco a poco accelerando all’allegretto). The quickening tempo between the three movements made its mark despite no more than the slightest breaks.  The third was allegro vivace.  Hungarian folk music features particularly in the latter two movements.  The music was often tense and highly strung and towards the end became frenetic.

It was a brilliant performance, and made me think how fortunate we are to have a resident quartet of such a high standard.

Monique Lapins introduced the final work, the Schumann.  Again, it was an early work, written in his ‘year of chamber music’, 1842, and composed in just three days.  Because of the enormous opposition from Clara Wieck’s father to her marrying Robert Schumann, and their recourse to the courts to gain permission, this too was a ‘dangerous liaison’.

Perhaps partly because Robert had by this time married Clara, the quartet is not as impassioned as the two quartets heard in the first half, and is considerably more lyrical than they.  However, it is not without passion, and the work’s many ascending sequences engender a positive mood.
(The movements are: 1. Andante espressivo – Allegro molto moderato, 2. Assai agitato, 3. Adagio molto, 4. Finale: Allegro molto vivace.)

Compared with the two works played earlier, this work was relatively straightforward; it was certainly more  Romantic, particularly the second movement, though the mood became gradually more disturbed, before the busy movement drew to a peaceful close.

Another disturbance intervened: the spotlights shining on the musicians went off, and there they were, playing just by the light of approximately 40 candles behind them.  As true professionals, not a note or a beat was missed, and they carried on.  The priest was able to go into an adjacent room and turn on the house lights, but the lighting for the players’ scores was not as good as the five spotlights had been.  It was easier for the reviewer to write notes, though!

The third movement was slow yet passionate in its opening phrases.  The music modulated and became more sombre.  The underpinning of the upper parts by pizzicato cello was most effective.  The melody here could be that of a song, something that Schumann excelled at, of course.

The final movement was quite jovial, like a lively dance, and brought the concert to a pleasing close.

There were some down-sides to this concert: the church was cold; the pews are very hard for sitting on for a concert-length period of time.  Then there was the lighting; at first, none for the audience, and then the failure.  As we exited the church, the priest remarked that the street lights were out.  All the CBD was without street lights, but traffic lights were working, as were lights in shop windows and some floors of office buildings.  This was noted in Friday’s news; it affected some suburbs as well as the central city.  Driving home, I was without street lights until coming to Molesworth Street.  But why should the temporary lights inside the church be affected??