Tag: chamber music

Valerie Rigg (violin) and Tessa Olivier (piano): Berceuse, Op 16 (Fauré), Violin Sonata in G minor (Debussy), Violin Sonata in D, Op 94 bis (Prokofiev)

 

St Mark’s Church, Lower Hutt

 

Wednesday 22 September, 12.15pm

 

There are days when Wellington is one of the best places in the world. When the sun’s shining after a southerly and you can see the trees on the Orongorongos and a midday concert at Lower Hutt calls for a drive (though better, a train ride) along the Wellington fault line. You see across the brilliant harbour to the snow-brushed Orongorongos and the Tararuas further north more thickly covered.

 

St Mark’s church on Woburn Road near the east end of the Ewen Bridge is easy to reach (the train from Wellington and the bus from Petone which stops nearby). Volunteers offer coffee for the audience before the concert; the front rows have padded seats and the church has a remarkably high vault which creates a generous acoustic.

 

Last year I heard Valerie Rigg, a former principal violinist with the NZSO, with pianist Tessa Olivier, playing Vitali’s (or who-ever’s) Chaconne and Prokofiev’s second violin sonata (I had not remembered that it was there that I had heard her play it). She was playing the same Prokofiev again, so I looked at what I’d written last year, and was delighted to find that I’d responded so well to it.

 

In this concert, a day after Olya Cutis and David Vine played it at Old Saint Paul’s, the Prokofiev was coupled with Debussy’s Violin Sonata; as a prelude, they played the charming Berceuse by Fauré. The latter was the perfect introduction, for the duo played it with great warmth and an obviously sympathetic musical rapport. I enjoyed its easy swaying rhythm.

 

Debussy’s sonata is as hard to play as it sounds, so that a performance that sounded as if the two musicians had lived with it for hundreds of hours was a real delight. Though I should have been prepared, from last year, to be totally beguiled by their playing, one does not always expect a player who’s spent most of her life in the ranks of an orchestra, to emerge as a comfortable and polished solo performer. Her intonation was as good as it gets, her command of Debussy’s quick-moving, glancing ideas was captivating.

 

Debussy’s piano demands more attention than the piano sometimes gets in a duo. Tessa Olivier was a most congenial companion, often catching the attention, but never obscuring the violin’s more outgoing lyrical contribution.

 

The church’s recently refurbished Bösendorfer is a lovely, and appropriate instrument for a recital like this: a mellow and somehow ready-made fit with the violin. It either refutes the common view (did it originate with Brahms?) that it is extremely difficult to achieve a blend of the two, or is a credit to both players and the way they use their instruments.

 

One of the most touching phases was in the last movement where fluttering trills and uncommon plunges to the open G string lead toward the beautifully crafted conclusion.

 

Prokofiev was the unusual hybrid who passed through his bad-boy phase, where it was more important to ‘épater le bourgeois’ than to make beautiful sounds; eventually, of course, like any really gifted composer, he found his way back to melody after his return to the Soviet Union in 1933 where, give or take the odd Stalinesque purge, there was an environment where his belief in the fundamental importance of melody was not a matter of scorn. There’s character, lyricism, attractive discord, rhythmic teasings, and tunes; yet this sonata, originally for flute, could have been written no earlier than about the 1930s (actually in the 1940s). Every movement has its individuality which the two players fully realized, relishing the gruff bowings in the middle of the Moderato first movement, the sort-of moto perpetuo that drives the Scherzo, with a slightly too hasty up-and-down motif.

 

What a sweet languid movement they made of the Andante! as the piano planted its even crotchets below the violin’s twisting and weaving. Only in the Finale, were there moments where the spirited, perhaps too confident violin might have been at the expense of perfect intonation and clean articulation. But always the combination of an agile left hand and a bowing arm that created both beautiful legato and the most full-blooded attack was exactly the recipe for this music.

 

The two awoke in me the odd sense that the music was not so much being performed, as simply being allowed, through the medium of the two musicians, to fill the space and follow an inevitable path into our souls.

 

Sadly, Tessa Olivier is about to return to her homeland, South Africa. May I suggest that wherever and whenever Valerie Rigg next appears, with whoever follows Ms Olivier, you make sure you’re there. 

 

 

Vaughan Williams: Pastorale in E minor; Janáček: Violin Sonata in A flat minor; Prokofiev: Violin Sonata in D, Op 94 bis   

 

Olya Curtis (violin) and David Vine (piano)

 

Old Saint Paul’s

 

Tuesday 21 September 12.15pm

 

Last year I heard these two musicians play the Elgar and Franck sonatas in this place. This year they stepped firmly into the 20th century, even though, ironically, Janáček was born before Elgar.

 

The Vaughan Williams Pastorale was not the typical English pastoral music that came to be rather scorned a generation or so ago; perhaps it was the fact that the violinist was Russian and it was warm and gentle, somewhat modal in its flavour. But just as much, the tone was set by pianist David Vine who, though English-born, plays idiomatically in whatever style is in front of him. 

 

The Janáček sonata was written during the First World War years and premiered in 1922. Though it’s ostensibly Slavic music, and Janáček was rather passionately pro-Russian, he found such a unique manner that a musician’s nationality can have no bearing. In any case, Curtis seemed less at home with the irregular tempi and diverse character of its first movement than did Vine; it went fairly slowly, not as Con moto as I expected from that marking. The players produced a more lyrical second movement, marked Ballada, with long melodies, though elsewhere the characteristic isolated and sharply contrasted motifs did not integrate so persuasively. They brought off the Allegretto well, with energy and conviction and, in spite of minor intonation flaws, captured a real Janáček feeling in the Finale, a sound that is unique in all music.

 

(Janáček is reported saying that the tremolo piano chords in the finale represented the Russian army entering Moravia, liberating it from Austria-Hungary. The Russian army may have penetrated as far as Moravia in the early stage of World War I, but was quickly driven back by the German army. It was the Treaty of Versailles that later gave the Czech and Slovak lands independence from Austria-Hungary.)

 

Prokofiev’s second sonata was in fact completed before his first (Op 80), which was not completed till 1946. David Oistrakh to whom Prokofiev had promised it before the war, had become impatient as the composer was heavily committed to other things such as the ballet Cinderella, and so he made a careful transcription of his flute sonata of 1942 which Oistrakh premiered in 1944.

 

The easy lyricism of the first movement of this sonata seemed to suit Olya Curtis rather more than the Janáček, and even in the scampering passages of the second movement, in spite of a few smudges, both players caught its spirit well. But she might have taken better advantage of opportunities to dig into its emphatic notes more strongly. In Prokofiev’s Andante, I could hear most clearly the ghost of the flute, in its most warm and open mood, as she moved her bow as far as possible from the bridge. Finally, in the Allegro con brio, there were a few rough edges and I was haunted by the sounds of certain great violinists whose miraculous renderings somewhat intruded. Nevertheless, the duo succeeded in bringing one of the liveliest and most approachable violin sonatas of the mid-century vividly to life.

 

 

Boccherini: Quintet in C for flute and strings; Max Reger: Serenade for flute, violin and viola in G, Op.141a; Turina: The Bullfighter’s Prayer; Mozart: Quartet for flute and strings in D, K 285; Copland: Two Threnodies; Ginastera: Impressiones de la Puna for flute and string quartet

 

The Elios Ensemble: Martin Jaenecke and Konstanze Artmann (violins), Victoria Jaenecke (viola), Paul Mitchell (cello), Karen Batten (flute)

 

Ilott Theatre, Town Hall

 

Sunday 19 September, 3pm  

 

The last in the Sunday 3pm concert series from Wellington Chamber Music was a relatively new ensemble of musicians of varying backgrounds, who presumably do not play together as often as does a professional ensemble. Yet they sounded in command of the music, totally familiar with each other, and comfortable with the disparate programme they had so imaginatively put together.

 

The addition of Karen Batten’s flute both added to the variety of the concert, and brought about a certain lightening of the tone; even though fundamentally the ensemble is a string quartet, the inclusion of a flute limits the range of music available. On the other hand, the most striking thing about the programme was the seriousness of more than one of the pieces.

 

The first movement of Boccherini’s flute quintet in C (two in that key are listed in the Gérard catalogue, G 420 and 427) had an unusual robustness, heavily built that seemed out of character with the usual tone of the flute. Its first theme, pithy and abrupt, which was dominated by the flute, could hardly less have reflected the soubriquet ‘Haydn’s Wife’ that was attached to Boccherini in the 19th century on account of the perceived feminine character of his music. The second movement, Minuet, in a slow ländler-like rhythm, allowed first violin more attention, while the Finale offered the first hints of the Boccherini that is familiar through the recent exploration of his hundreds of string quartets and quintets.

 

One of the characteristics that marked the piece was the more interesting cello part played by Paul Mitchell – the composer was one of the most famous cellists of his day. But in spite of the ingratiating flute part, and the attractive writing for the ensemble, the quintet hardly recommended itself as a singular musical discovery.

 

Max Reger’s Serenade for flute, violin and viola had qualities that were diverting, but in spite of a liveliness and lightness of spirit in the outer movements and a certain pensiveness in the Larghetto, it failed to make a great impression. This, in spite of a performance that made the most of its colour and the sprightliness of the flute playing, and which proved sympathetic with the idiom that Reger had developed: something between Bach, Schumann, Brahms, and perhaps less kindly, composers like Max Bruch or Carl Reinecke. Sadly, its undistinguished melodic quality left it without much reason to look for another hearing.

 

Turina’s La oración del Torero, for string quartet, lifted the first half with its unpretentiousness, and its feeling of genuine musical impulse. It is a modest piece which paints a feeling, emotional picture, using melodies that may not be striking but have a certain distinction, and a quiet drama that hardly suggests the bravado of the bull-ring, but rather the quasi-religious emotion that devotees of the art of the torero lay claim to.

 

Undoubtedly the best and most attractive piece in the concert was Mozart’s Flute Quartet in D – one of the two he wrote. Nothing in it suggests Mozart’s alleged indifference to the flute, and the performance captured all the charm of its three lively, imaginative movements. The second, Adagio, is largely a solo for flute with pizzicato strings, and was a delightful vehicle for Karen Batten’s melifluous playing.

 

Copland’s two late Threnodies, the first, highly compressed, for the death of Stravinsky and the second, rather more discursive and expressive, for that of arts patroness Beatrice Cunningham, launched the second half in a somber vein, Though these pieces would hardly seem natural territory for the flute, Batten turned her talents persuasively towards their elegiac mood and their interpretation; if the Copland of Appalachian Spring and El Salón Mexico was remote, a serious spirit was not unwelcome here,.

 

The choice of music suited to unusual instrumental combinations has become much easier with the facilities of the Internet, and an interesting programme such as this is more easily achieved, given the taste and idiomatic sensibility that this ensemble exhibits.

 

The final piece marked a different direction again, and though superficially in a vein culturally related to the Turina, much had happened in the 35 years between the two composers. Impressions of the Andean Uplands, rather than being visually inspired, reflected the flutes, songs and dances of the peoples in its three parts, though it seemed to me that human beings were not Ginastera’s main concern. The first part, Quena (a type of Andean flute), suggested a somewhat bleak landscape, its flutes bereft of those who might be playing them. The second, in triple rhythm, and third parts, were more lively, with writing that taxed the players and entertained the audience.

 

Wellington is fortunate to have yet another quartet and a solo flutist of this quality, drawn mainly from professional orchestral players of individual talent who have been together long enough to develop an impressive ensemble feeling in a very wide variety of musical styles.

 

 

The New Zealand String Quartet

Schumann: String Quartets Nos 1 in A minor and 2 in F; Shostakovich: Nos 13 in B flat and 7 in F sharp minor

Hunter Council Chamber, Victoria University

Tuesday 31 August, 7.30pm 

This was an important series of ten concerts by the New Zealand String Quartet, in five centres nationwide; it included two different programmes, of all three of Schumann’s quartets and four of Shostakovich’s 15.

I heard the first of the two programmes at the church of St Mary of the Angels on Saturday the 28th, which my colleague Peter Mechen has reviewed (that programme had also been played a week earlier in the Hunter Council Chamber at Victoria University) and the second on Tuesday 31 August, also in the Hunter Council Chamber. There were probably round 200 at St Mary’s and a full house (about 160) at the Hunter room.

The quartet’s challenge was to celebrate the 200th anniversary of Schumann who wrote only three string quartets, by putting them with another composer whose music might complement it in some way. At first glance, Shostakovich looked an odd choice, and though Helene Pohl made a reasonable case in her introductory remarks, the connections were rather tenuous: Schumann’s personality dichotomy: his imaginative creations Florestan and Eusebius, and Shostakovich’s two faces – the public one acceptable to the Soviet authorities and the private one which expressed his inner self.

In the end I felt Schumann had paid the bigger price, for there is hardly any music written in any age that equals Shostakovich’s intensity, anguish and profound personal self-revelation in a fearful political environment. Most composers in past eras have lived under repressive regimes of various kinds, but they were the norm; social barriers, lack of freedom and extreme inequality were everywhere; it did not occur to them to depict it in their music.

But Shostakovich’s fate was to live in a place which had declined into a condition that had become much more repressive and dangerous than the rest of Europe (give or take Fascism).

Alongside Shostakovich’s, some of the Schumann music sounded to me emotionally lightweight, as if he was trying to write music that would entertain rather than what was genuinely spirited, with integrity and genuine expressive power.

That struck me particularly in the F major quartet, played last. In the second movement Schumann seemed to be putting on the mask of a happy face to please Clara, who had urged him to write music that audiences would understand. While the Scherzo appealed strongly as one of the most interesting movements, of variety and confident handling, I felt that in the finale, Schumann reverted to his jolly mask, writing music that was more conventional. The real Schumann, on the other hand, wrote music that was joyful, spirited which, up to a point, becomes more exciting the faster it is played, such as the March of the Davidsbündler in Carnaval or the finale of the Piano Concerto, or the Piano Quintet.

Though I had had similar feelings about the last movement of the A minor quartet, its minor key succeeded in keeping Schumann from conventional temptations in the three earlier movements, and the players always exploited in the liveliest way his inventiveness and impressive competence of writing for the four instruments.

What was striking about all Schumann’s quartets however, was both the warmth of the tutti sound, and the interesting music given variously to all four instruments; and I heard more arresting individuality from Gillian Ansell’s viola and Douglas Beilman’s violin that one often hears in quartet context.

Though it was Schumann’s birthday, it was Shostakovich who really stole the limelight. Again, we had the pleasure (if that is in any way the word) of two more of the little-known quartets of Shostakovich. If there were rewarding passages for the viola in Schumann, Shostakovich could be accused of having a torrid love affair with it.

No 13 is an extraordinary piece, written in 1970 when the composer was ill, and at its opening the viola carries most of its unrelenting bleak view of the world – of his world at least. It is in one movement, though there are several contrasting episodes that do offer sufficient variety and structural character to justify its formal status as a quartet. Rolf Gjelsten’s cello also has a major role in the music’s landscape.

Though Shostakovich’s language is essentially tonal, dramatic use is made of pointed discords, that might be followed by high, marcato notes from the violins. Above all, if one does not succumb to the outward pessimism, there is dark and tragic beauty in this piece, which ends with a series of rising harmonics that might suggest either some kind of spiritual aspiration or merely life evaporating to nothingness.

In the second half, they played the more conventionally ordered No 7; three movements following the normal pattern, through a dark liveliness in the first movement, to which the players brought a fierce energy and a thrusting sense of momentum; the change in the Lento movement to Doug Beilman’s angular violin arpeggios, soon joined by Helen Pohl’s febrile first violin. The last movement opens with stunning violence that Gillian Ansell diverted to hollow rhetoric with her beautifully resonant viola; and the piece ends with the violins and viola in flighty ascending scales that seemed to offer solace or consolation.

A Shostakovich Quartet Series
That the quartet has got nearly a third of Shostakovich’s quartets under their collective belts for these two concerts prompted the rather obvious thought that they should be encouraged to master them all and offer them as the musical highlight of the 2012 New Zealand International Arts Festival. It is time for a musical renaissance at the festival.

I was at the wonderful Verbier Festival in Switzerland in 2007 where, at 10pm every other night in the alpine village’s minuscule protestant church, the Israeli Aviv Quartet played them all, not in order but in groups evidently guided by length and contrast. During a week’s stay I heard seven quartets in three concerts (Nos 4 and 14, 1, 12 and 8, and 3 and 7).

The performances captured the more dedicated chamber music lovers and there were struggles to get inside the church, all successful, overcoming any scruples by the local fire department or festival administrators.

These concerts have proved that we have a string quartet capable of interpreting these works with a passion, ferocity, and depth of musical and political insight that is rare. They should be encouraged to undertake the entire Shostakovich quartet canon, some of the greatest music of the 20th century.

Mok-hyun Gibson-Lane (‘cello)

with Catherine McKay (piano)

JS BACH – Suite No.1 in G Major, for Solo ‘Cello / GYORGY LIGETI – Suite for Solo ‘Cello

LUIGI BOCCHERINI – Sonata for ‘Cello and Piano in C Major

MAX BRUCH – Kol Nidrei Op.47 / DAVID POPPER – Elfentanz (Dance of the Elves) Op.39

Central Baptist Church, Boulcott St., Wellington

Sunday 29th August 2010

Moky Gibson-Lane, visiting home in New Zealand from her various commitments as a performer in Europe, gave a delightful recital in Wellington’s Central Baptist Church, one which stimulated as much audience pleasure as a similar concert she gave on a home visit a year previously. She’s currently playing with the Berlin Staatskapelle, frequently conducted by Daniel Barenboim, and is a foundation member of the Stabrawa Ensemble, led by the Berlin Philharmonic’s concert-master, Daniel Stabrawa. She makes frequent Arts Channel television appearances in Germany, and has recently taken part, with Barenboim, in the Berlin premiere of Mosaic, a new work by Elliot Carter. The prospect, therefore, of hearing a musician with such credentials was too good an opportunity to miss; and, happily, as with last year’s recital, the young ‘cellist amply demonstrated with her playing why she’s such a sought-after musician in one of the world’s musical capitals.

Her recital was half-solo, half ‘cello-and-piano partnership, beginning with two major solo works, one a standard classic, and the other a contemporary masterpiece. Just what it is about JS Bach’s music that enables one to listen to countless performances of it without tiring I’m not quite sure (an exploration beyond the scope of a recital review), but the perennial freshness of the notes invariably seems to re-kindle from various musicians the same sense of re-awakening, of re-discovery, one which Mok-Hyun conveyed in her performance of the G Major Solo ‘Cello Suite from first note to last. From the expressive sonority of the Prelude, through the Allemande’s stately ornate decorations (very baroque-defining!), and the wonderfully spontaneous mixture of freedom and constraint with which she propelled the lively angularities of the Courante,  the ‘cellist proceeded to make the work her own. Her Sarabande had beautifully-focused dignity, contrasting beautifully with the energies of the two Minuets, the first cheerful and forthright, the second wistful and circumspect; while her “lightness-of-being” touch with the concluding Gigue brought out all of the music’s life-affirming buoyancy.

I’d never heard the Ligeti Solo ‘Cello Suite before, and was prepared for something a lot more acerbic and uncompromising than what was presented. The work itself had an interesting, and somewhat fraught genesis, being originally inspired by Ligeti’s unrequited passion for a female ‘cellist and fellow-student at the Budapest Music Academy in the late 1940s. Ligeti was then asked, a few years later, by an older, well-known female ‘cellist, Vera Dénes, for a piece she could play. The composer expanded his previous one-movement work into a two-movement Suite; but with Hungary under Soviet control in the 1950s, the piece had to be submitted to the all-powerful government-controlled Composers’ Union for acceptance. Interestingly, the committee allowed Vera Dénes to record the work (for a planned broadcast which never took place), but refused its performance in public, on the grounds that its second movement was “too modern”. It wasn’t until 1979 that the piece was performed again. Ligeti called the first movement a “dialogue”, intending (no doubt with his youthful student amour in mind) a man and a woman conversing. He remarked also that this music was “heavily influenced” by the works of Zoltan Kodaly. A sense of something tender and heartfelt awakening was conveyed by the soft strummings of the opening, alternating with measures of full-throated melody, the strummed notes “bent” to give a heightened emotional effect. An impassioned middle section alternated between low and high lines, and brought out powerful playing from Mok-Hyun, the “Hungarian” melody then giving way to further soft pizzicato chords that ended the movement.

Ligeti aimed for contrast in the virtuoso second movement, modelling the title Capriccio on Paganini’s well-known Caprices for solo violin. The “Presto con slancio” directive for the performer means “‘very quick, with impetus”, and produced here an extremely exciting performance, running figures, trenchant attack, and tortured, agitated lines – a wonderful volatiity, almost an expiation of the heart-on-sleeve feeing evinced in the first movement. The exuberant final bars brought out an enthusiastic audience response to some great playing.

Moky Gibson-Lane was joined by pianist Catherine McKay for the second half, beginning with a Sonata by Boccherini which sounded like Haydn at the beginning, the music having plenty of muscularity and sprightliness. It was mostly ‘cello with dutiful piano accompaniment in this movement, really, with the development bringing out a more colouristic and in places even sombre mood, though nothing too tragic or heart-rending. The slow movement brought out the ‘cellist’s beautiful cantabile, rich and low in places and decorated occasionally with melismatic impulses; while the finale began as a good-natured jog-trot, but with demands on the soloist involving spectacular high finger-board work – not always DEAD in tune, but impressively virtuosic, nevertheless.  Rather more musical substance was provided by Max Bruch’s lovely, lyrical “Kol Nidrei”, the opening exchanges between piano and ‘cello long-breathed and full of feeling. Here, the rhapsodic melodies became big-hearted, committed statements, but with both ‘cellist and pianist preserving a ritualistic, almost ecclesiastical feeling about the exchanges, before relaxing into the rapt, hymn-like romantic dialogues of the work’s final section. Mok-Hyun celestially floated the last few measures of her line, the final ascent perhaps not ideally pure of tone, but nevertheless, together with Catherine McKay’s angelic support, a beautiful supplication.

We sinners needed bringing down to earth again after experiencing such stratospheric evocations; and the final item did just that – Czech composer David Popper’s sprightly, and in some places somewhat manic “Elfentanze” (Dance of the Elves) was a kind of  Bohemian version of “Flight of the Bumble Bee”, featuring plenty of rapid figurations from both ‘cellist and pianist, and some hair-raising, right-off-the-fingerboard bedazzlements from the ‘cellist at the end, which, to use the classic phrase, brought the house down. At a supper straight afterwards most people were happily able to more fully extend those gestures of appreciation that we readily and enthusiastically showed both musicians at the end of the concert.

Wellington Chamber Music Society

Turína: Piano trio no.2 in B minor, Op.76; Rebecca Clarke: Piano trio; Mendelssohn: Piano trio in D minor, Op.49

Cook Strait Trio – Blythe Press (violin), Amber Rainey (piano), Hugo Zanker (cello)

Ilott Theatre. Wellington Town Hall

Sunday, 22 August 2010, 3pm

It was a pleasure to hear this young trio again, albeit with a different cellist – this one from Canterbury, now playing in the Magdeburger Philharmonic Orchestra in Germany.  The other two are still studying, Press having completed his Bachelor’s degree at Graz, Austria, and now studying for a Master’s; Rainey is studying piano accompaniment at the Guildhall in London.

It was amazing that two piano trios made up of young players could be heard in Wellington in two days, the other being the Boyarsky Trio on Friday evening.

A confident start to the Turína work set the tone for the entire concert.  I was unfamiliar with this trio, but it had much charm in the first movement.  All three instruments were in complete accord, playing with full tone, and complete rhythmic and interpretative integrity.

The second movement featured vivace opening and closing, with a slow section in the middle.  Despite much repetition in the string parts, the piano never dominated.

The final movement was stirring and vigorous, and played with a panache which the solid technique of each of the players permitted.

Pianist Amber Rainey spoke before the Rebecca Clarke work, in which it was revealed that Hugo Zanker had only played with the other two musicians for a month.  She continued with an informative introduction to the Rebecca Clarke work, asserting that it should be played more often.  She described it as impressionistic and dissonant.  However, I didn’t entirely agree with her remark about the status of Clarke; what about Fanny Mendelssohn and Clara Schumann?

Two years ago we heard the Tawahi Trio play Rebecca Clarke in the WCMS Sunday afternoon series.  That time, it was Prelude, Allegro and Pastorale, which made a very favourable impression.  Since then, I have heard Clarke’s works on the radio a number of times, and I find that there is a Society recently created in her name, to promote her works.  Grove dismisses her as a violist, married to the pianist James Friskin.  (Probably only in the case of Schumann is a wife ever noted in writings about the husband!)

The first movement featured abrupt mood changes, and lower register passages for both strings, which produced lovely tone.  This was true in the second movement also, yielding a mysterious quality. In the third movement a sonorous piano solo was underpinned by delicate string accompaniment.  In this movement particularly, there were intriguing figures for all the instruments.  The middle section had a dreamy quality, then it was back to the sparkling opening.

The piece was interesting and skilful, and played by a group of talented young musicians, but I did not find it an endearing work.

Endearing and entrancing are, however, the words for Mendelssohn’s Piano Trio in D minor.   There was plenty of warmth and depth to this playing.  The opening agitato movement was not uneasy, like Clarke’s appassionato.

The soulful second movement was notable for the many changes in dynamics, always appropriate.  Listening to these performers, one would not guess their youth.  Amber Rainey has a compact, unfussy style of playing, and is always totally in accord with her colleagues.

The Scherzo and Finale exhibit Mendelssohn’s delightful treatment of his themes.  The latter’s ending was brilliant, especially from the piano.

This was thoroughly delectable playing of a wonderful work, completing a concert of distinguished, finely crafted performances.

All present would wish the trio well in their continuing studies.

Schubert: String Trio in B flat, D 581; Beethoven: String Trio in G major, Op. 9, no. 1; Dohnanyi: Serenade, Op.10; K. Boyarski: Mosaique Musicale

Trio Boyarsky: Ben Baker(violin), Konstantin Byarsky (viola), Amelia Jakobsson-Boyarsky (cello) – Capital Theatre Productions

Old St. Paul’s, Mulgrave Street

Friday, 20 August 2010, 5.30pm

About 90-100 people attended the concert; the rather odd hour prompted the organisers to sell drinks, sandwiches, muffins and chocolate bars before the concert and during the interval – an excellent idea.

While the printed programme gave plenty of information about the young performers (Ben is just 20),the works played were simply listed, with no programme notes, and not even the tempi markings of the movements.  Ben Baker gave spoken introductions to the items – very brief in the case of the Schubert, longer for the Beethoven including historical background.  The Dohnanyi and the work by the violist in the trio both received good introduction.

The concert opened with a truly lovely sound, right from the first chord of the Schubert, partly at least due to the warm wooden acoustic of the building.  There followed beautiful phrasing and shimmering tone throughout the trio.

Boyarsky’s rather small viola did not have the effulgent resonance of the violas in the NZSO, which were so highly praised by conductor Richard Gill in the Town Hall last night, but the playing, as of all three musicians, was of a very high standard indeed. It was a very enjoyable rendition.

The Beethoven began with a little more vibrato than I would have liked, in the dramatic opening chords.  But it grew into a very fine performance; assured, accurate playing. Each player had impressively fluent bowing action.

It was strange that there was little eye contact between the performers, but it didn’t seem to matter: nuances were faithfully observed.  The first two movements are sombre in mood, and if there was not always a depth of feeling apparent, this will come as the players mature.

The melodies the composer assigned to the different instruments were effectively given prominence, especially in the third movement.  In the quick finale there were beautifully graded dynamics, before the spirited ending.

Dohnanyi’s romantic Serenade contrasted with the previous two works, and the style of playing reflected this.  There was lovely tone, and good dynamic contrasts.  As in the other works, these talented young musicians were technically accomplished.

Boyarski’s work, dedicated to his wife, the cellist, made a slow build-up through low notes, followed by repeated, rapid passages leading to a slow melody, then through slow modulations to a violin melody with pizzicato accompaniment.  It traversed many moods.  There was extensive and interesting use of harmonics, and a robust cello solo.  It then livened up and became frenetic and discordant.

I wasn’t sure if ‘Mosaique’ in the title meant ‘to do with Moses’, or Mosaic as in a pattern of coloured tiles or gems – I suspect the latter.

Towards the end, the piece seemed to get bogged down, but it was an interesting and worthwhile work.

Although the addition of continuous seat cushions has made the pews in Old St. Paul’s somewhat more comfortable, the minimal depth of the seats (fine for Anglican services, where standing and kneeling are intrinsic) means they are not ideal for a full-length concert – at least, not for anyone over about five feet tall (or should that be 1.5 metres?)

Another matter to do with the audience rather than the players is the perennial one of coughing.  I would have thought that open-mouthed coughing at concerts would be a ‘no-no’ on health risk grounds as well as those of being disruptive of the music.  Cloth handkerchiefs (better as stifling tools than paper tissues) are not expensive, nor is the crook of one’s elbow.  If I can’t suppress a cough I normally endeavour to cough with a closed mouth.  It can be stressful, but it can be done, with greatly reduced volume the result.