Tag: chamber music

Stroma enhances Wellington with music inspired by where sea meets sky

Posted on by Steven Sedley

Stroma Conducted by Hamish McKeich

Ingram Marshall: Fog Tropes (1981)
Mark Carter, Mathew Stein, (tpt), Samuel Jacobs, Julian Leslie (hn), David Bremner, Shannon Pittaway (trb)
Deidre Gribbin: What the Whaleship Saw
Anna van der Zee and Megan Molina (vn), Nicholas Hancox (va), Robert Ibell (vc)
Eve de Castro-Robinson: Pearls of the Sea (2005)
Bridget Douglas (fl, bass fl), Carolyn Mills (harp)
Tristan Murail: Treize couleurs du soleil couchant (1978)
Bridget Douglas (fl), Patrick Barry (cl), Anna van der Zee (vn) Robert Ibell (vc), Kirsten Robertson (piano)
Anna Thorvaldsdottir: Reflections (2016)
Anna van der Zee (vn), Nicholas Hancox (va), Robert Ibell (vc)
John Rimmer: Where Sea Meets Sky 2 (1975)
Bridget Douglas (fl), Patrick Barry (cl), Megan Molina (vn) Robert Ibell (vc), Kirsten Robertson (piano) Thomas Guldborg (percussion)

Hannah Playhouse

Thursday 30 May, 7:30 pm

Stroma is a mixed chamber music ensemble drawn from musicians of the NZSO. It performs contemporary experimental music. This programme included music by New Zealand, American, Irish, French, and Icelandic composers, but in particular, it honoured the 80th birthday of John Rimmer, one of New Zealand’s most iconic composers.

The programme started with fog horns, recorded in San Francisco Bay. A brass sextet of two horns, two trombones and two trumpets engaged in a dialogue with the fog horn against a background of the swirling sea and the squeals of sea birds. Ingram Marshall is an American composer influenced by minimalism trends of the 1960s. He says about Fog Tropes that “It is possible to listen to your pieces as a kind of tonality ‘behind the fog’, with gradual changes in layers of sound and ‘shadows & lights’. It seems that sometimes there’s a kind of impressionist colour in which we could find smaller sound particles.” It is these shadows and light that the listener can seek in this work.

From fog horns the programme moved to disaster at sea, the sinking of the whaling ship, Essex, in 1820. Deidre Gribbin is from Belfast. What the Whaleship Saw is a work for string quartet. It depicts the calm sea, then the storm that led to the tragedy. It is an impressionistic work. The strings generate sounds of sheer beauty without melodic progression, the peaceful calm sea is shattered by the disaster of the wrecked boat, then calm music again as the boat sinks but echoes of sea shanties appear in the background to illustrate the ill-fated sailors.

New Zealand composer Eve de Castro-Robinsons’s Pearls of the Sea follows up the sea theme. It writing for an unusual combination of instruments, a bass flute and a harp is a challenging exercise. The work is inspired by a poem by Len Lye. It exploits the aural potential of both instruments, the flute explores the range of sounds that can be produced, like the Japanese shakuhachi, trombone, foghorn and even low tom-tom. The harpist stretches the limits of the usual use of the harp by banging on the frame of the harp, and sweeping the strings to create a swooshing sound.

From the sea, the programme moved on to colours. Tristan Murail, a French composer, is associated with the ‘spectral’ techniques, the use of properties of sound as the basis of harmony. His Treize couleurs du soleil couchant tries to capture colours in sound. Like Monet in his painting, it uses patterns of sound as building blocks of music and repeats the same musical idea thirteen times as Monet did in paint the same scene over and over again. It is scored for a combination of instruments widely used by modern composers from Schoenberg to Messiaen, violin, clarinet, cello and piano.

Reflections by Icelandic composer Anna Thorvaldsdottir is a string trio in which instruments form overlapping ‘waves’. The music is composed as much by sounds and nuances as by lyrical material.

The final work is by John Rimmer, leading New Zealand composer and Associate Professor of Music at Auckland University. It is a tribute for his 80th birthday. His Where the Sea Meets the Sky 2, is an impression of a plane journey across the Tasman Sea. In this, he tries to capture the qualities of light seen through an aeroplane window. It was prompted by a poem of Ian Wedde in which the sea does not meet the sky. Originally Rimmer wrote this work for an electronic synthesizer, which he reworked for a live ensemble, a combination of flute, clarinet, violin, cello, piano and percussion, which aims to capture the electronic sounds of the original version.

Hamish McKeich, musical director of Stroma, and the thirteen musicians from the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra challenged the audience to think of the nature of music. The music was far from the usual concert repertoire, strange for some, lacking in usual points of reference, but it enhanced the musical experience of those who took the trouble to listen. The Wellington musical scene is richer for having an ensemble such as Stroma in its midst.

 

Chamber Music Hutt Valley celebrates 40 years – no more appropriately than with the Amici Ensemble

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Chamber Music Hutt Valley presents:
The AMICI Ensemble

Music by Rossini, Piazzolla, Mozart and Spohr

ROSSINI – Sonate a Quattro No.1 in F Major (arr. for wind quartet)
PIAZZOLLA – Three Tangos (arr. for violin and double-bass)
MOZART – Oboe Quartet in F Major K.370
SPOHR – Grand Nonetto in F Major Op.31

The AMICI Ensemble
Patrick Barry (clarinet) / Robert Weeks (bassoon) / Andrew Joyce (‘cello)
Robert Orr (oboe) / Samuel Jacobs (horn) / Bridget Douglas (flute)
Gwendolyn Fisher (viola) / Donald Armstrong (violin) / Oleksandr Gunchenko (d-bass)

Little Theatre, Lower Hutt,

Monday, 27th May, 2019

What a surprise to discover that Rossini’s youthful Sonate a Quattro No.1 in F Major was here masquerading as a wind quartet! – in fact, I was going to add, “in true Rossinian fashion” before I discovered that the arranger was one Frederic Berr, a clarinettist who similarly refurbished for wind quartet no less than five of Rossini’s youthful “String Sonatas” , and provided a sixth from an “Andante and Variations” by the composer to complete the set. I had long known this music in a version for string ensemble of the original quartet (double-bass instead of ‘cello!) from a famous LP recording by the renowned Academy of St.Martin-in-the-Fields directed by Neville Marriner  – so when flutist Bridget Douglas began the enticing and gracefully-descending opening figure of the sonata, I pricked up my ears in utter delight at the well-remembered beguilement of this music’s figure and movement.

The string quartet original had sprung from the fertile mind of the twelve year-old Rossini in 1804, on holiday at a friend’s country estate, the host, Agostino Triossi, a double bass -player, for whom the boy composed these works (Rossini in later life called them “Six dreadful sonatas” elaborating with the words “composed by me……when I was at a most infantile age….”), Rossini himself taking the second violin part in the first performances at Triossi’s house, recalling that his own playing “was not the least doggish, by God!”

Whether in string or wind form the music is, in fact, a joy, thanks to the precocity of the composer and the skill and experience of Frederic Berr in making his arrangement –  the latter had, of course an advantage of variation over the original in the differentiation between flute and clarinet tones as against the two violin parts! The whole performance breathed an air of utterly relaxed music-making, to the point of incorporating a luftpause for a page-turn during the course of the Andante – very civilised! The carefree, “down by the river” melody which began the finale was delivered with plenty of “schwung”, never rushed, and allowing some deliciously bubbly playing to emanate from the horn in its contrasting sequence.

Astor Piazzolla’s music will forever be associated with the tango, but as a revolutionary, rather than a traditionalist. Becoming a virtuoso bandoneon player, he worked with traditional groups before the pianist Artur Rubinstein, sensing his talent, advised him to go and study with the Argentinian composer Alberto Ginastera. This developed his interest in modern classical music and encouraged him to seek further tuition as a composer with Nadia Boulanger in Paris, who advised him to continue exploring the music of his roots, and fuse the forms with his knowledge of other musical styles to create something new. Despite criticism from traditionalists he went on to develop Tango Nuevo, which incorporated elements of jazz and classical music; and in which he constantly evolved adventurous and experimental methods of expressing his ideas.

Three of his Tangos were presented here by violinist Donald Armstrong and double bassist Oleksandr Gunchenko, all arrangements by another double-bassist German-born Andreas Wiebecke-Gottstein. What struck me was the aplomb with which both musicians performed this repertoire, bringing out the inherent physicality and gesturing associated with the sounds, making it “all of a piece” in a way that enabled the music to express its character – thus we caught and savoured the first Tango’s sultriness in both sight and sound – its title, J’attends (an allusion, perhaps, to the dance’s origins as incidental music played by musicians in bordellos) reflected in the pent-up tensions generated by the piece’s ready receptiveness to stimuli, the music impulsively moving here and there, but ultimately held to ransom by the need to await some kind of “arrival” or “happening”, physical, emotional or spiritual. The second, and at the outset, more sombre setting, proved more volatile in its growing physicality, the dance pulsating more and more strongly, before turning inwards, but then growing again, the ending defusing the seriousness with some cheeky pizzicati.

The third Tango was a livelier affair, the bass-player’s rapid alternations between arco and pizzicato, with occasional percussive touches, sounding more conventionally “jazzy” than the other two pieces, both musicians putting across a “to the manner born” air with the suppleness of their gestures and the fluency of the music’ trajectories, winding the rhythm down at the end most beguilingly. An enthusiastic audience response possibly encouraged the players to “treat us” to another piece, a fantastic, play-as-you-go pizzicato sequence by the bassist, leading to a mesmeric “pick-up-the-bow” sequence involving eerie harmonies and almost sleazy movements, the players transforming our surroundings into a world rich, strange and flecked with impulses of danger….the reaction from the auditorium was rapturous!

Returning to relative conventionality (but WHAT conventionality!), we were then given Mozart’s sublime Oboe Quartet, allowing Robert Orr the chance to shine as the sole wind player amid a clutch of strings! I liked the bright, perky oboe sound, characterful but never overbearing – the dialogues between various lines are so fluent and detailed throughout the exposition (repeated), making the more fluid, dreamy development section seem like another world, just for a few moments…..the Adagio gave the oboe the chance to really “sing”, which Orr enabled beautifully, the line filled with inflected detailing and delight. Finally, the Rondeau, with its sprightly gait, and lovely “vertiginous” central section for the oboe, allowed the soloist to spin and loop-the-loop as if in unfettered and exuberant flight for a few precious moments, before returning to the formation! A simple stepwise ascent to a top F, and the music’s delight came to a graceful end.

The evening’s final work was the Nonet, or, more properly, the “Grand Nonetto in F Major Op.31” by Louis Spohr.  Donald Armstrong outlined for us some of Spohr’s distinctions as a musician, including certain innovations he pioneered and helped establish, one being the invention of the chinrest on the violin, another his pioneering of the conductor’s baton. He was an exact contemporary of Ferdinand Ries, Beethoven’s pupil, and was himself on friendly terms with Beethoven. He produced symphonies, operas, concertos and various works for small ensemble, including this Nonetto, one of the fruits of a long-term contract between the composer and an impresario by the name of Johann Tost, who purchased from Spohr the exclusive performing rights to the latter’s chamber music – Spohr (unlike certain other prominent composers of the time) being of an amenable nature, the deal proved mutually beneficial!

The work couldn’t have better “set off” either the individual instruments or their groups against one another throughout the four movements, the composer employing an opening “motto” theme at the outset with great skill and invention, to what seemed like both the players’ and the listeners’ delight! Each succeeding movement had its own particular flavour, the scherzo seeming at first to leave behind the mellifluous atmosphere of the work’s opening, with deliciously dark string tones pursuing a romantic adventure, though the winds soon brightened things up! The players brought out the fun of the major/minor key alterations, before Donald Armstrong’s violin charmed us with a birdsong-like Trio whose sweetness all but banished the thought of the journey still to come, as almost did a second “interlude” introduced by the clarinet, a gently-insinuating chromatic figure augmented most winningly by the other winds.

The  slow movement, marked Adagio was begun raptly by strings, and continued radiantly by the winds, the contrasting timbres conjuring appropriately “inwardly-sounded” resonances with the strings and more “al fresco” ambiences through the winds, the two groups interchanging their timbral characteristics most attractively throughout, repeating a slower version of the four-note motto introduced at the work’s beginning. The finale took us from contemplation to comedy, beginning with a running figure resembling a silent movie sequence, whose drollery was further enhanced by the introduction of a syncopated rhythmic pause at the end of each phrase, one whose “chink” simply cried out repeatedly to be filled, the winds duly obliging before the end! It was all part of an overall agglomeration of delight shared in both playing and listening, reaching its apex at the work’s engaging and fully-occupying conclusion! Bravo, Amici!!

 

 

 

Kiwa Quartet takes enjoyable, interesting journey through 125 years of quartet repertoire for Wellington Chamber Music

Posted on by Steven Sedley

Kiwa Quartet: Malavika Gopal and Alan Molina (violins), Sophia Anderson (viola), Rolf Gjelsten (cello)
(Wellington Chamber Music: Sunday series)

Haydn: String Quartet Op. 76 No. 2 ‘Fifths’
Webern: Langsamer Satz
Janáček: String Quartet No.1 ‘Kreutzer Sonata’
Mendelssohn: String Quartet No. 2 in A minor Op. 13

St. Andrew’s on The Terrace

Sunday 26 May 2019, 3 pm

Listening to string quartet music is a delightful way of spending a Sunday afternoon. We have had the privilege of hearing three excellent string quartets over the last three weeks, the New Zealand String Quartet, the Aroha Quartet, and now the Kiwa Quartet.  It is fortunate for Wellington to have such an abundance of talent around.

The Kiwa Quartet was formed in 2015 as part of a project supported by the NZSO Professional Development Grant. What a great investment that Professional Development Grant was!  Investing in the four musicians who formed the Kiwa Quartet certainly paid handsome dividends. First violin, Malavika Gopal, member of the NZSO, studied with the Alban Berg Quartet and was part of a prize winning quartet; Alan Molina, came from America to the NZSO with a wealth of orchestral experience; violist, Sophia Anderson is the Principal Viola of Orchestra Wellington; the cellist, Ken Ichinose had unfortunately injured his finger and was replaced by the very seasoned cellist of the New Zealand String Quartet, Rolf Gjelsten. The four make up a confident, balanced ensemble playing with a rich, beautifully and blended sound.

The concert began with the second of Haydn‘s ‘Erdödy’ quartets, Op. 76, No. 2. This is late, mature Haydn. He was 65 and had developed the art of the string quartet from light background music into substantial music with a wide scope for drama and emotion that leads to the later quartets of Beethoven. This quartet got its nickname ‘Fifths’ from the descending fifth of the first movement, which gives the movement an air of gravitas. The second movement is a charming Andantino, which was played with just the right amount of lightness. The Menuetto had a stomping of peasants’ dance quality typical of late Haydn, and the last movement, Vivace ended the work on a cheerful rollicking note. These Haydn quartets are a challenge for musicians, both technically and musically. There are a lot of rapid notes that have to be articulated clearly and the Kiwa players did this admirably.

For me the surprise of the programme was Webern‘s Langsamer Satz. This is no Second Viennese School of dissonant music that Webern is associated with. This is a lush romantic piece. ‘Langsamer Satz’ means Slow Movement. It was the first composition exercise assigned to Webern by his teacher Schoenberg. The work is in one movement built on three lyric themes combined in different ways and taken to a conclusion of great intensity. It provided solo opportunities for each of the members of the quartet and in particular, the viola. You could wallow in their beautiful sound. The impetus for the work, Webern wrote, was his walk in the Austrian woods with his cousin, Wilhelmine Mortl, with whom he was in love. It is a recollection of a happy time. The music was lost and only discovered many years after Webern’s death. This was probably no accident. Although the music is beautiful, it was not what Webern wanted to be remembered by.

By contrast, the Janáček String Quartet is a tempestuous affair. It depicts psychological drama that  contains moments of conflict and emotional outbursts. Janáček wrote that he was imagining a poor woman, tormented and run down, just like the one the Russian writer Tolstoy describes in his Kreutzer Sonata. The work is in four movements. They are all con moto driven, disturbed. The musical language is typical of Janáček, which almost abandons traditional harmony, homophony and counterpoint and makes use of contrasting textures. It may be a reflection of the insecure world of Europe after the First World War. It is a unique string quartet with none other like it.

After the Janáček, the Mendelssohn Quartet returned to the string quartet tradition. In 1827, when Beethoven died Mendelssohn was eighteen years old. His second string quartet was modelled on Beethoven’s late quartets, and is influenced by them. Chuzpah, you might think, an eighteen year old trying to take on Beethoven’s mantle, but Mendelssohn was an amazing prodigy and produced a major work that could stand alongside the great masterpieces. Despite its official number, this was Mendelssohn’s first mature string quartet, although he had written a number of quartets before as well as his Octet.

The String Quartet No. 2 in A minor borrowed the structure of the late Beethoven quartets, and in particular, Op 132, and even some of the Beethoven motifs appear in Mendelssohn’s piece, but the language is distinctively Mendelssohn’s. The first movement starts with a dramatic, slow introduction that quotes the tender love song ‘Frage’, Op. 9/1 which he wrote for a young woman he might have taken a fancy to, a theme that keeps recurring, and this is followed by a spirited passage. The slow movement opens with an extended melody, which devolves into a fugal section echoing Beethoven. The Intermezzo has the lilting melody that is like his Midsummer’s Night music, but also like a simple song he might have overheard in a fair ground. The final movement starts with dramatic chords, again reminiscent of Beethoven and then develops into light filigree music that often characterises Mendelssohn’s, interrupted with sudden contrasting themes as they do in Beethoven, among them even a theme that resembles one from the Ninth Symphony. It is an enchanting work. It is a pity that Mendelssohn’s quartets are not heard more often.

The Kiwa Quartet took us on a long and interesting journey from Haydn in 1797 through Webern in 1905, Janáček in 1923 and back to Mendelssohn in 1827. It was a thoroughly enjoyable voyage. The Kiwa is a fine quartet that can stand alongside the best of New Zealand’s chamber music groups.

 

Memorable, Houstoun-led recital of gorgeous piano quartets at Waikanae

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Waikanae Music Society

Michael Houstoun and friends (Martin Riseley – violin, Gwendolyn Fisher – viola, Andrew Joyce – cello)

Brahms: Piano Quartet No 2 in A, Op 26
Fauré: Piano Quartet No 1 in C minor, Op 15

Waikanae Memorial Hall

Sunday 19 May, 2:30 pm

Concerts featuring Michael Houstoun, alone, or with others, have usually attracted big audiences at Waikanae. This Sunday afternoon concert, which attracted, I’d guess, around 400, couldn’t have been accommodated in any of the usual chamber music venues in Wellington other than the too-large Michael Fowler Centre or perhaps St Mary of the Angels. The advertised line-up for this concert had included Andrew Thomson on the viola; he was replaced on account of a shoulder injury by distinguished Chicago-born, UK resident violist, Gwendolyn Fisher, here as guest associate principal viola in the NZSO.

Brahms’s second piano quartet
What impressed me at once was the delicacy, intimacy of the playing, which is what the notes themselves as well as the markings call for; apart from the occasional more arresting moments, the beauty of this favourite piano quartet derives from its melodic subtlety and charm and Brahms’s instinctive gift for exploiting the musical potential of the piano quartet which had not been much employed by the great composers: really only Mozart and Schumann (those by Beethoven and Mendelssohn were youthful works). Though it’s in A major, usually a buoyant, happy key, its spirit is restrained, and that characterised most of the first movement, perhaps to the point where it risked affecting something of the music’s energy. Was there a bit more ‘non troppo’ about the playing than ‘Allegro’? Nevertheless, the singular virtues of the playing – clarity, flawless ensemble, lyricism, the flowing, triple rhythm, unity of feeling – eventually came to be of far greater importance, doing full justice to this inspired masterpiece.

The slow movement, Poco Adagio is a remarkable creation, particularly in Brahms’s boldness with prolonged, near-silences, that alternate with rhapsodic episodes that seemed so suited to the collective temperament of the players. Perhaps as a result of the first movement’s refinement, it sometimes seemed emotionally rather close to the feeling of the previous quarter hour. Occasionally, it was possible to feel that the piano was in charge of the sound world; but though I don’t much like singling out individuals in chamber music, there’s that almost uncanny episode early on where Andrew Joyce’s beautiful cello sounds duet with Houstoun’s rhapsodic arpeggios.

Though I love it all, the Adagio haunts me and that’s what this performance did.

Though the Scherzo, third movement, cannot be regarded as jocular (it’s oddly marked Poco allegro) it certainly doesn’t avoid some discreet animation. But that’s an emotion that Brahms leaves mainly to the Trio section whose dynamic moments struck with a sudden burst of energy. With the return of the Poco allegro, I found, somewhat to my surprise, the character of the piano rhythmically a bit brusque, not quite as febrile as the sounds in my head were expecting.

Whatever has gone before, convention expects the last movement to be energetic and probably full of optimism. Up to a point, it was: though still scrupulously sensitive and in lovely accord. But there was a feeling of caution and a calm that lay just below the level of the notes and hardly ever burst forth even with the sort of abandon that Brahms could allow himself. If one might have felt there was a shade too little joie-de-vivre, I think what these musicians played was profoundly in accord with what Brahms composed, and was reproduced here in uniformly beautiful playing. The spirited acceleration of the last few bars did create a fleeting spirit of real delight.

Fauré’s Op 15
Fauré’s first piano trio is probably the best loved of his chamber works. And I found this warm-hearted performance true to this fairly early example of his complex, somewhat enigmatic nature. It began with what I felt just the right amount of energy and charm; any moments when the music strayed or seemed to be distracted seemed to enhance rather than detract from the essence of Fauré’s art.

The second movement came alive with interesting dancing rhythms that shifted evasively and the central, muted section created a gorgeous tapestry of sound. In the third movement, Adagio, I probably expose an odd reaction by sensing a pre-Elgarian quality (30 years too early). It was one of the many occasions when the score sounded like a piano solo along with a separate string trio, most elegantly played.

And the playing of the last movement, Allegro molto, happily confirmed the sound that was in my head from the many hearings of this charming piece, where the solo moments fitted happily with each other and with the warmth of the entire movement.

Where does Fauré’s music come from? 

Chamber music in France till about the time he wrote this, in the late 1870s, hardly existed. In chamber music I can think only of Franck’s four early piano trios and a few works by Lalo composed before this Fauré work (a couple of piano trios, a string quartet and a piano quintet, none of which I’ve heard). Saint-Saëns wrote a piano quartet and a piano quintet in his teens and another quartet in the 1870s but they seem to be ignored. French music was dominated by opera, and few composers even attempted to buck its popularity. So the mainly opera/ballet composers till around the 1870s (Boiëldieu, Auber, Hérold, Halévy, Adam, Thomas, Gounod, Offenbach, Hervé, Lecocq, Delibes) neglected chamber music as well as, for the most part, orchestral music (apart of course from Berlioz). Outside of France, Schumann is regarded as an influence on Fauré, but Schumann’s chamber music doesn’t strike me as having much in common with Fauré’s.

If you’re curious about that era of French music (as I am), an interesting place to start is the website of the Foundation/Palazetto Bru-Zane, based in Venice, but which has made a big impact through co-productions of neglected ‘Romantic’ and late 18th century French opera, with numerous French opera houses. In his bicentenary year, Offenbach’s huge output has benefitted greatly; even more than did Gounod in his bicentenary last year.

Farewell Michael Houstoun
This was a gorgeously delivered recital, and a fitting way for Michael Houstoun (probably) to bring his association with the Waikanae Music Society to an end (he has announced his retirement at the end of this year). The society is just one of many musical presenters that has been rather heavily dependent on his name on their concert bill-boards for performances that have meant the difference between breaking even and operating on an eventually fatal deficit. He has been one of a mere handful of New Zealand pianists who gained an international reputation; and he was one, perhaps the only one, to have come back home to enrich the musical life of New Zealand. He has been an important contributor over the many years of the Waikanae society’s concert series and this was certainly the occasion for the many long-standing audience members to reflect on the numerous memorable performances that he has given.

 

Memorable, Houstoun-led recital of gorgeous piano quartets at Waikanae

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Waikanae Music Society

Michael Houstoun and friends (Martin Riseley – violin, Gwendolyn Fisher – viola, Andrew Joyce – cello)

Brahms: Piano Quartet No 2 in A, Op 26
Fauré: Piano Quartet No 1 in C minor, Op 15

Waikanae Memorial Hall

Sunday 19 May, 2:30 pm

Concerts featuring Michael Houstoun, alone, or with others, have usually attracted big audiences at Waikanae. This Sunday afternoon concert, which attracted, I’d guess, around 400, couldn’t have been accommodated in any of the usual chamber music venues in Wellington other than the too-large Michael Fowler Centre or perhaps St Mary of the Angels. The advertised line-up for this concert had included Andrew Thomson on the viola; he was replaced on account of a shoulder injury by distinguished Chicago-born, UK resident violist, Gwendolyn Fisher, here as guest associate principal viola in the NZSO.

Brahms’s second piano quartet 
What impressed me at once was the delicacy, intimacy of the playing, which is what the notes themselves as well as the markings call for; apart from the occasional more arresting moments, the beauty of this favourite piano quartet derives from its melodic subtlety and charm and Brahms’s instinctive gift for exploiting the musical potential of the piano quartet which had not been much employed by the great composers: really only Mozart and Schumann (those by Beethoven and Mendelssohn were youthful works). Though it’s in A major, usually a buoyant, happy key, its spirit is restrained, and that characterised most of the first movement, perhaps to the point where it risked affecting something of the music’s energy. Was there a bit more ‘non troppo’ about the playing than ‘Allegro’? Nevertheless, the singular virtues of the playing – clarity, flawless ensemble, lyricism, the flowing, triple rhythm, unity of feeling – eventually came to be of far greater importance, doing full justice to this inspired masterpiece.

The slow movement, Poco Adagio is a remarkable creation, particularly in Brahms’s boldness with prolonged, near-silences, that alternate with rhapsodic episodes that seemed so suited to the collective temperament of the players. Perhaps as a result of the first movement’s refinement, it sometimes seemed emotionally rather close to the feeling of the previous quarter hour. Occasionally, it was possible to feel that the piano was in charge of the sound world; but though I don’t much like singling out individuals in chamber music, there’s that almost uncanny episode early on where Andrew Joyce’s beautiful cello sounds duet with Houstoun’s rhapsodic arpeggios.

Though I love it all, the Adagio haunts me and that’s what this performance did.

Though the Scherzo, third movement, cannot be regarded as jocular (it’s oddly marked Poco allegro) it certainly doesn’t avoid some discreet animation. But that’s an emotion that Brahms leaves mainly to the Trio section whose dynamic moments struck with a sudden burst of energy. With the return of the Poco allegro, I found, somewhat to my surprise, the character of the piano rhythmically a bit brusque, not quite as febrile as the sounds in my head were expecting.

Whatever has gone before, convention expects the last movement to be energetic and probably full of optimism. Up to a point, it was: though still scrupulously sensitive and in lovely accord. But there was a feeling of caution and a calm that lay just below the level of the notes and hardly ever burst forth even with the sort of abandon that Brahms could allow himself. If one might have felt there was a shade too little joie-de-vivre, I think what these musicians played was profoundly in accord with what Brahms composed, and was reproduced here in uniformly beautiful playing. The spirited acceleration of the last few bars did create a fleeting spirit of real delight.

Fauré’s Op 15
Fauré’s first piano trio is probably the best loved of his chamber works. And I found this warm-hearted performance true to this fairly early example of his complex, somewhat enigmatic nature. It began with what I felt just the right amount of energy and charm; any moments when the music strayed or seemed to be distracted seemed to enhance rather than detract from the essence of Fauré’s art.

The second movement came alive with interesting dancing rhythms that shifted evasively and the central, muted section created a gorgeous tapestry of sound. In the third movement, Adagio, I probably expose an odd reaction by sensing a pre-Elgarian quality (30 years too early). It was one of the many occasions when the score sounded like a piano solo along with a separate string trio, most elegantly played.

And the playing of the last movement, Allegro molto, happily confirmed the sound that was in my head from the many hearings of this charming piece, where the solo moments fitted happily with each other and with the warmth of the entire movement.

Where does Fauré’s music come from? 

Chamber music in France till about the time he wrote this, in the late 1870s, hardly existed. In chamber music I can think only of Franck’s four early piano trios and a few works by Lalo composed before this Fauré work (a couple of piano trios, a string quartet and a piano quintet, none of which I’ve heard). Saint-Saëns wrote a piano quartet and a piano quintet in his teens and another quartet in the 1870s but they seem to be ignored. French music was dominated by opera, and few composers even attempted to buck its popularity. So the mainly opera/ballet composers till around the 1870s (Boiëldieu, Auber, Hérold, Halévy, Adam, Thomas, Gounod, Offenbach, Hervé, Lecocq, Delibes) neglected chamber music as well as, for the most part, orchestral music (apart of course from Berlioz). Outside of France, Schumann is regarded as an influence on Fauré, but Schumann’s chamber music doesn’t strike me as having much in common with Fauré’s.

If you’re curious about that era of French music (as I am), an interesting place to start is the website of the Foundation/Palazetto Bru-Zane, based in Venice, but which has made a big impact by funding co-productions of neglected ‘Romantic’ and late 18th century French opera, with numerous French opera houses. In his bicentenary year, Offenbach’s huge output has benefitted greatly; even more than did Gounod in his bicentenary last year.

Farewell Michael Houstoun
This was a gorgeously delivered recital, and a fitting way for Michael Houstoun (probably) to bring his association with the Waikanae Music Society to an end (he has announced his retirement at the end of this year). The society is just one of many musical presenters that has been rather heavily dependent on his name on their concert bill-boards for performances that have meant the difference between breaking even and operating on an eventually fatal deficit. He has been one of a mere handful of New Zealand pianists who gained an international reputation; and he was one, perhaps the only one, to have come back home to enrich the musical life of New Zealand. He has been an important contributor over the many years of the Waikanae society’s concert series and this was certainly the occasion for the many long-standing audience members to reflect on the numerous memorable performances that he has given.

 

A memorable concert from the Aroha Quartet: exciting Ligeti and a Beethoven masterpiece

Posted on by Steven Sedley

‘Metamorphoses’
Aroha Quartet (Haihong Liu and Konstanze Artmann – violins, Zhongxian Jin – viola, Robert Ibell – cello)

Mozart: String Quartet No. 17 in B flat K 548 ‘Hunt’
Ligeti: String Quartet No. 1 ‘Metamorphoses Nocturnes’
Beethoven: String Quartet No. 13 in B flat Op. 130

St Andrew’s on the Terrace

Tuesday 7 May 2019, 7:30 pm

With concerts by two string quartets, the New Zealand String Quartet and the Aroha Quartet within two days, the Brodsky quartet on the 20th and the Kiwa quartet on the 26th of May seems like a festival of string quartets. With so much music, it is the works that challenge that makes these concerts memorable.

The Aroha Quartet played Mozart and Beethoven, beautiful but familiar music, but it was György Ligeti’s First Quartet that stood out and made one think. The piece was written in 1953/54. Ligeti was 30 years old. He had survived the war in which he served in a Jewish labour service unit, while both his brother and father died in concentration camps. In the years after the war he studied with renowned teachers at the Budapest Music Academy, Kadosa, Veress, and in particular, Kodaly. He was making a name for himself as a composer of choral pieces and settings of folk songs. His early works were often an extension of the musical language of Bartók. But some of his pieces could not be played under the Communist regime of Hungary: too difficult, too cerebral. His First String Quartet was not performed until he fled Hungary in 1956 and settled in Vienna. He called the piece Metamorphoses; it is a transfiguration, the changes of a four note theme, G, A, G sharp, A sharp over a chromatic bass played by the cello into a series of variations like distinct segments. These segments include vigorous rhythmic sections, peasant dances with heavy stomping of boots, passages that recall Bartók’s night music, gentle, melodic, surreal There are huge dynamic contrasts, barbaric dance themes, humour, sarcasm, buzzing mosquito passages. At the end the piece returns to the four notes it started with. It is an exciting work and we should be grateful to the Aroha Quartet for introducing it to us.

Beethoven’s Quartet No. 13 in B flat is a colossal piece in six movements. It encompasses a whole world of emotions, from the noble opening Adagio followed by an energetic contrasting section, then to the simple children’s playground theme of the rollicking Presto in which voices taunt each other, there is humour, there is the courtly dance of the Andante, the jolly rhythm of the Alla danza tedesca, and ultimately the quartet culminates in the haunting Cavatina that brought tears to Beethoven’s and probably many listeners’ eyes, which is finally resolved in a light-hearted Finale. The great architecture of this work is assembled from simple, at times naïve parts. The Aroha Quartet played it with passion, with beautiful tone and meticulous clear phrasing.

The concert opened with Mozart’s ‘Hunt’ Quartet, one of the half dozen he dedicated to Haydn. Although it shares the key with the Beethoven work, it comes from a different world. Written in 1784, it reflects the last years of the ancien régime, a perceived stability in which all was orderly. It is a beautiful work and The Aroha Quartet captured its spirit.

This was a memorable concert and the Aroha Quartet are one of the great musical assets of our city.

 

 

New Zealand String Quartet produce joyousness and profundity for Wellington Chamber Music

Posted on by Steven Sedley

Wellington Chamber Music
New Zealand String Quartet

Beethoven: String Quartet in A Op. 18 No 5
Jack Body: Bai sanxian (2009)
Shostakovich: String Quartet No. 10 in A flat  
Brahms: String Quartet in A minor Op. 51

St. Andrews on The Terrace

Sunday 5 May, 3 pm

A concert by the NZ String Quartet is always an event to look forward to. This is the quartet’s 32nd season, and over the years they have gained an international reputation. In this concert they covered a broad period of the musical development of the string quartet.

In 1798 Beethoven was a budding piano virtuoso, who had moved to Vienna and was gradually making a name for himself as a composer. He lived in the shadow Haydn. Like Haydn, he published his first set of quartets, Op. 18, as a set of a half dozen. No. 5, in A major, is playful, with a touch of humour and Haydn-like surprises, a graceful dance movement and an extended set of variations that explore the potential of a simple theme. This piece received an energetic sparkling reading, but for this listener at least, some of the charm, the light touch was missing.

Jack Body’s Bai sanxian was something entirely different. The music of Asian cultures is a recurring theme of Jack Body’s work. He deliberately and provocatively stepped outside the main stream of Western music. This short piece comes from a collection of transcriptions and arrangements of music from some of the Chinese minority nationalities of Yunnan province in South-West China. The string quartet imitates the Chinese traditional instruments, the first violin and cello plucking their instruments while the second violin and the viola carry the melodic line. The music challenges the listener to explore unfamiliar musical traditions, to listen carefully and perhaps ask questions about the universal nature of music.

Shostakovich is a controversial composer. William Walton described him as the ‘greatest composer of the 20th century’, while Pierre Boulez dismissed him as ‘the second or even third pressing of Mahler’. There is certainly a special Shostakovich sound and a Shostakovich perception of what music is about. He is the Holy Fool, who witnesses all the terrible as well as all the joyous things around him. The overall character of the 10th String Quartet is dark, in some places sinister and fearful. It opens with a four note motive played by the solo violin, then the other instruments join in one at a time. An unanswered question hangs over the movement. This is followed by a furious second movement played fortissimo. At one moment the viola and plays on the bridge of her instrument to create the effect of a sinister Mephistophelean laughter. The Adagio is a mournful passacaglia that gradually turns darker. The final movement breaks away from the mournful character of the earlier movements and is jaunty and carefree at the beginning, but then returns to the melancholic air of the whole piece. Life was tough in Shostakovich’s Russia, but he implies that there is light amidst the gloom, life must carry on.

The final work in the programme was Brahms’s Second String Quartet, Op. 51, No. 2. Beethoven’s colossal final quartets weighed heavily on Brahms. How could one write a string quartet that could follow up these works. He had a number of attempts at writing a string quartet and destroyed all of these, until at the age of 40 he published, after numerous revisions, two works with which he was satisfied. Brahms worked in the idiom he inherited and used the language of German folk music, but he deconstructed these haunting themes, broke them up, turned them into deep, meaningful conversations between the four instruments. There is light and joyousness in the second movement and grace in the third, Minuetto, but Brahms never abandons himself to a rollicking good time. In the last movement he revisits the Hungarian czardas that provided many happy themes for his music, but notwithstanding all the jollity, the music is subdued. This was a profound performance.

It was a very satisfying afternoon of music, enjoyed by a large and knowledgeable audience. The quartet’s many years of playing together was reflected in their seamless, smooth playing. May they keep this up for many more years and enrich Wellington’s musical life.

 

Brass septet produces haunting and enjoyable chamber music at the MFC

Posted on by Steven Sedley

Septura Brass Septet: An American in Paris
(Chamber Music New Zealand)

Ravel: Ma mére l’Oye (Mother Goose)
Debussy: Preludes
Gershwin: Three Piano Preludes; Songbook; An American in Paris

Michael Fowler Centre

Tuesday 30 April, 7:30 pm, 2019

Three trumpets, three trombones, one a bass trombone, and a tuba is not the usual combination for a chamber music concert, but seven principal brass players of London Symphony orchestras got together to demonstrate that brass is capable of producing chamber music. Horns, such an integral part of the brass section of an orchestra, were missing. They might have added a mellower sound to the ensemble, but obviously this was not what these players had in mind. Simon Cox and Matthew Knight, the two artistic directors of the group arranged the music for them. Their guiding principle was that the music should sound as if it was originally written for brass.

The audience was challenged to leave their preconceived ideas of what the music should sound like at the door and listen with fresh ears. The pieces in this programme are well known and familiar, but played by a brass ensemble they all sounded new.

Ravel and Gershwin knew each other and held each other in high esteem; they were both influenced by Debussy. It was this relationship that was the theme that held these works together.

The Mother Goose Suite, arranged from the piano duet rather than the orchestral version sounded colourful. It had a depth that cannot be attained on the piano. The special effects were enhanced by the innovate use of mutes. The beautiful rich sound of the brass was specially effective in the chorale sounding last movement, The Fairy Garden.

The Debussy Preludes for solo piano are lovely miniatures and played by the brass they attained a different, richer sound. The rich brass chords, the underlying bass of the trombones and tuba underscored the well-known melody of the Girl with the flaxen hair played on the trumpet. The trombones produced the humorous sound effects appropriate for the Minstrels. The Sunken Cathedral had beautiful bell like sounds produced with layer upon layer of brass sound. This was a different Debussy.

The second half of the programme was devoted to the music of Gershwin, arrangement of the Three Piano Preludes, short little pieces from the Songbook and the major work, An  American in Paris. Gershwin created a colourful world of his own which encapsulated the jazz age, the frivolity of the 1920s, and these pieces sounded particularly appropriate for a brass ensemble. It was an era after the First World War in which people believed that life was short, people had to make the most of it, live it up, seek happiness in gaiety, but underlying it all there was a touch of melancholy. This was captured by the joyful yet sensitive performance.

Britain has a great tradition of brass music, but this concert was a world away from the usual sound of brass bands. This group had a flexibility that tested the limits of the players’ ability and together they produced a sonority seldom heard. They shed new light on familiar music; one came away from the concert with the haunting sound of beautiful brass playing. It was a concert with a difference, but very enjoyable.

 

Youthful and visionary Schubert from Helene Pohl and Jian Liu

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Te Kōkī New Zealand School of Music presents:

Helene Pohl (violin) and Jian Liu (piano)

SCHUBERT – Sonata for Violin and Piano in G Minor D.408
Fantasie in C Major for Violin and Piano D.934

Adam Concert Room,
Te Kōkī New Zealand School of Music
Victoria University of Wellington

Friday 29 March 2019

Within a fortnight of the NZ String Quartet’s inspirational presentation at the NZ School of Music’s Adam Concert Room of two major works from the string quartet repertoire, we were, at another lunchtime concert, able to enjoy for a second time, on this occasion, the artistry of one of the Quartet’s players – the group’s leader, Helene Pohl, performing in tandem with the much-acclaimed Jian Liu, who’s currently the Head of Piano Studies at the School. Of course, the NZSQ has been the quartet-in-residence at the School of Music in Wellington since 1991 – so we’ve lately been relishing the fruits of some of the performing talents among the School’s remarkable line-up of current tutors.

The programme chosen by this concert’s performers captured something I thought both rare and vital – consisting of two works for violin and piano by Franz Schubert (1797-1828), it managed to highlight aspects of the best of both the youthful and mature composer’s efforts, beginning with a Sonata in G Minor D.408, which, along with two other works, was written between March 1816 and August 1817. The three weren’t published until 1836, eight years after the composer’s death, and were styled as “Sonatinas”, despite Schubert’s autograph scores referring to them as “Sonatas”.

They’re works which have been largely regarded as “apprentice” efforts by posterity, as the diminutive “Sonatina” title implies, coming down to us with judgements such as “(they) breathe an intimate atmosphere, requiring no virtuoso bravura from their performers”, and “these are violin sonatas of the older, Mozartian type, with the violin playing a subordinate role to that of the pianoforte”. However, in Pohl’s and Liu’s hands, the G Minor work came across as rather more interesting than either of those descriptions might have suggested.

Nothing like an angular unison to grab the attention at the start! – the piano made something poetic from the utterance, the violin then continuing the line, the music’s mood almost naively changing to one of cheerful insouciance, Pohl’s violin somewhat garrulously “running” with the piano’s strolling gait before Liu deliciously “leaned” into a more march-like sequence, inspiring a wayfarer’s song-like response from the violin.

A minor-key lament by the violin began the central development, but the mood seemed delightfully ambivalent as major, then minor sequences unceremoniously pushed one another out of the way throughout, the invention here sharply-etched and tautly-woven by both players. What gave the discourse increased strength and gravitas was the decision by the musicians to play all the repeats, with the resulting amalgam of absorbing reinforcement and variation that such a course enables – even at this stage of proceedings I thought it considerably enhanced the work’s potential for depth of feeling and detailing, and especially when delivered with such committed focus as here.

A sweet, beguiling melody on the violin, gorgeous in effect, opened the slow movement, the piano answering with a chirpier phrase, which was then reinforced by deeper, viola-like tones from the stringed instrument, husky and characterful. I loved the touches of “misterioso” in the development, freely modulating, and here being “breathed” so enthrallingly by the duo. With the repeat came the recapitulation’s “second’ return, here brought sweetly to mind by the players like an old friend or fond memory.

Despite the players’ advocacy the Menuetto did seem “lighter” in content, though the lovely, flowing Trio subject made for a heart-warming contrast to the somewhat rumbustious opening – certainly the repeats helped give the music greater substance, however illusionary! The finale brought a touch of flowing minor-key melody before vigorously “majoring” – Pohl and Liu “went with” the music’s changeable character so sharply and directly, veering from the Schubertian to the Mozartean in a trice, and back again (Schubert’s homage to the “tried and true”, perhaps….)

The development was a brief call-to-arms, more for show than with any “action” in mind, and the recapitulation brought the silveriest of tones from Pohl’s violin – so enchanting! Again the repeats seemed to bolster the music’s confidence in itself, so that we were freshly amazed by Schubert’s invention rather than inclined to relegate the music to “also-ran” status. Helped by Pohl’s and Liu’s intensities the music on this occasion was made to punch well above its normal weight, for our excitement and satisfaction.

Having plunged with her pianist straight into the earlier work at the concert’s beginning, Pohl then “introduced” the second half’ for us. Fascinatingly, she talked about the Sonata we’d just heard in relation to the great Fantasie in C Major (about to be played), reflecting for us on the “change” in Schubert’s music over the duration between the two, and offering some thoughts on these differences.

I thought her mentioning, firstly, the influence of Beethoven’s music, and then the effects of Schubert’s worsening health at this time, made for telling ideas to ponder – I hadn’t considered as strongly her third “factor’ which she outlined just as convincingly – the rise in instrumental virtuosity at this time, led by the example of  violinist Nicolo Paganini, said to be in league with the forces of darkness(!).

Schubert wrote the Fantasie, his last work for violin and piano, in December 1827, for one Josef Slavik, whom the composer described at some stage as ‘a second Paganini” and accordingly produced a work bristling with virtuoso difficulties, as much, it ought to be said, for the pianist as for the violinist. After the work’s premiere, in Vienna in January 1828, a critic reported that the work did not widely please as was hoped: – “The Fantasie occupied rather too much of the time a Viennese is prepared to devote to the pleasures of the mind. The hall emptied gradually, and the writer confesses that he too is unable to say anything about the conclusion of this piece.”

Nowadays, the Fantasie is regarded as a masterwork, bold in its conception, brilliant in its execution and heartfelt in its emotional content. What obviously confused the Viennese was the work’s length and its out-of-the-ordinary structure – it’s basically a bringing-together of contrasted episodes around a Schubert song with a number of variations – the song is Schubert’s popular setting of Friedrich Rückert’s Sei mir gegrüsst! (‘I greet you!’). Violinist and pianist played a measure of the song for us, after which Pohl briefly outlined for us the structure of the complete work – and then we were off!

The piano began, with tremolandi that gurgled and bubbled as an oscillating sea of sensations, above which the solo violin soared sweetly and surely, the piano momentarily dancing before resuming its tremulous inclinations. A brief but intense violin cadenza-like flourish (not as clean as the player might have wished, on this occasion, but the poise never faltered), and Pohl and Liu began a delightfully-inflected Hungarian-like dance sequence in canonic form, the music varying its delivery after  several measures, becoming trenchant in places and releasing surges of exhilarating”heart-in-mouth” energy – the momentary strains placed on each player by what seemed like fiendishly insistent figurations merely added to the excitement and tension of the performance, the return of the dance bringing momentary relief before the music’s elemental surgings again took charge, great lurches of emphasis engendered by the writing and met with full-blooded involvement from both instruments. Gradually the piano led the way towards the music’s elevated central sequences, a brief and resonant pause leading to the opening strains of the song Sei mir gegrüsst! 

First piano and then violin gave their voices entirely to song, Liu investing his two augmented sections of the melody with tremendous, almost orchestral, weight and emphasis, contrasting with the violin’s sweetness when it returned each time. A first variation was polonaise-like in rhythm, engagingly chunky, and almost rough-hewn, rather than suave and well-tempered, while a second produced cascading piano notes and string pizzicati, both instruments varying their figurations with impromptu-like flourishes, the violin reverting to arco for each measure’s concluding phrase!

A third variation seemed even more hair-raising, the violinist rushing excitingly through her vertiginous fingerwork, and the pianist’s fingers maniacally dancing atop the instrument’s keys. Pohl and Liu seemed to play all the music’s repeats in this work as well, further intensifying and enriching the range and potential delights of the territories, and creating an ethos of magnificent, give-it-all-you’ve-got playing! Variation Four seemed then to turn the music on its heels and point it back towards the way it had begun, firstly the piano and then the violin arching the music gently but surely away from the song’s A-flat major and back towards the opening C Major.

This time the piano tremolandi colluded with the violin’s ever-intensifying, unwardly-pushing lines towards what I’ve always thought of as an orgasmic release-point, a massively-affirming dance of life, carrying the music’s continually-burgeoning energies towards a near nirvana of fulfilment with the ecstatic return of Sei mir gegrüsst! (again, exquisitely silvery violin tones joining in with the piano’s pearl-like purity). It could have been left there by the composer – but having “bought into” the realm of virtuoso excitement, the music, almost instinctively, seemed to unleash the “coiled spring” of pent-up virtuosity allied to musical brilliance, a concluding cataclysm of joyous-sounding energies completing the triumph! What a work and what a performance!

Janacek and Beethoven String Quartets from the amazing NZSQ at Te Kōkī New Zealand School of Music

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Te Kōkī New Zealand School of Music presents:

The New Zealand String Quartet
JANÁČEK– String Quartet No. 1
BEETHOVEN – String Quartet No.16 Op.135
NATALIE HUNT – Data Entry Groove (2014)

New Zealand String Quartet –

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

Adam Concert Room,
Te Kōkī New Zealand School of Music
Victoria University of Wellington
Friday, 15 March 2019

(Reviewer’s note: I’ve deliberately left off publishing this review until now to allow a week or so’s worth of air and space to blow into and around things concerned with the horrific events that took place in Christchurch on the same day of the concert. It’s a small gesture set against happenings in a vast and unpredictable world, but I’d nevertheless like to dedicate these words to those whose lives were so tragically ended by what took place in those Christchurch mosques that day, and to all those people who responded, both immediately and over the days that followed, to the needs of fellow-New Zealanders of all persuasions with kindness and understanding that helped restore some hope and faith in a future whose bright dream had been suddenly darkened……)

Monday 25th March 2019

It all seemed too good to be true – here we were at a FREE CONCERT at the Adam Concert Room up at the University, about to be enthralled by the country’s most prestigious string quartet in two major works from the genre’s repertoire, one from the nineteenth and the other from the twentieth century, plus an additional piece from someone who’s proving to be a most interesting member of a stimulating “new  wave” of young New Zealand composers – as close to a “something for everybody” scenario as one could perhaps get at an hour-long concert by a single group!

Beginning the concert was the first of two string quartets by Moravian composer Leoš Janáček, one bearing the sub-title “Kreutzer Sonata”. In a letter, written by the composer to a much younger married woman, Kamilla Stösslová, whom Janáček regarded as his “muse”, writing her over 700 letters, he revealed his music’s purpose: “What I had in mind was the suffering of a woman, beaten and tortured to death, about whom the Russian author Tolstoy writes in his Kreutzer Sonata”. Of course, Tolstoy (who ironically didn’t much care for music!) used the title of one of Beethoven’s most famous chamber works to intensify his story’s emotional “charge”, that of a woman in a loveless marriage caught up in the passions of the music when playing the work with a handsome violinist, and as a result being beaten to death by her jealous husband.

Violist Gillian Ansell nicely anatomised the music’s terrain beforehand, introducing musical examples played by the group that resembled incredibly burgeoning slices of raw emotion. It was obvious straightway how the group possessed the temperament, confidence and technical skill to be able to enter wholly into this tortured world, one marked by the composer’s penchant for extremes of both expression and technical address, and with the players aware of how such music worked best via a suitably no-holds-barred approach.

Here the ensemble infused these extremities and razor-sharp contrasts with the utmost concentration, making it all sound as if each member was “living” the frenzied outbursts and tortured trajectories of the music’s narrative – as one commentator’s description succinctly puts it, expressed in writing that’s “less melody than compelling, emotionally-charged talking”. Like Mussorgsky before him in Russia, so Janáček wished to catch the realism of his countrymen’s speech patterns in his writing with all their angularities and astringencies, and, in this context heightened by extremes of feeling.

The second movement’s sharp contrasts between the dancelike motifs and the searing coruscations of emotion here simply conflagrated the textures, having a simultaneous “stunning” and “drawing-in” effect on the listener, the playing remarkable in its candid impact. By contrast, the third movement began with a melancholic duet-like passage from first violin and ‘cello (a quotation from Beethoven’s work, used to highlight the “illicit” rapport between the two players in the story), nastily punctuated on a number of occasions with scintillating shards of sound, here all remarkably coherent in an overall expressive sense while disturbing in their own realm of impulsiveness. Still, the performers had, one sensed at all times, a “grip” on the overall design that allowed the stridencies free rein to shock and unnerve without straying from the whole.

A brooding calm hovered over the finale’s opening, the lyricism heart-rending and bleak-sounding (shades of Sibelius’ Fourth Symphony)! until the viola began pulling the violins along agitated stretches of territory, the music building and sharpening its tensions as an incredibly intense dotted rhythm sequence piled “Pelion upon Ossa” in its anger, fright and menace – the “moment of murder” then suddenly seemed to dissolve the music’s substance, leaving little more than crumpled, exhausted shadows – so very enigmatic! – and here, so heart-stopping in its searing execution by these intrepid players…….

I’d always regarded Beethoven’s last quartet as a kind of roller-coaster-ride as well, actually, but of a different kind to what we had just heard, alternating the visceral with the playful and enigmatic, as opposed to Janacek’s relentless assault. Here were Olympian forces at play, with whatever moments of stress and angst suggested (in the work’s finale) defused as systematically as they’d been developed, like the inevitable movements of cosmic bodies through the heavens, leaving we earthbound listeners gaping in bemused astonishment!

‘Cellist Rolf Gjelsten here emulated Gillian Ansell’s penetrative introductory remarks regarding the Janacek, entertaining us greatly with his theories regarding Beethoven’s famous “question-and-answer” passages at the finale’s beginning, and provoking amusing responses from the other quartet members. Thus enlightened and emboldened, we began our listening, with the lower strings right at the start posing a question or remark answered by a pithy, increasingly insistent exclamation from the violins – “Pardon?” – or perhaps “You’re joking!” Straightaway, this fusing of the portentous and the commonplace – the fabulous with the ordinary – set the tone for the rest of the work. Not a note was wasted, the effect an amazing sense of freedom in simplicity.

By contrast, the scherzo had us on the edges of our seats, the players alternating jovial muscularities with spectral mutterings, punctuating the proceedings with off-centre sforzandi, and grim-humoured rebeginnings, building up to the notorious “madcap trio”, three whirling dervishes trying to catch the lone violin mid-flight – a fearful symmetry gone berserk! The occasional “wildness” of intonation to my ears sounded appropriate – what would a perfect, “squeaky-clean” rendition of this music do except reduce the untamed, out-of-control exhilaration of the whole, anyway?

Gorgeously rich and deep-toned at the slow movement’s beginning, the melody was “sung from within” at first, before being lifted aloft for us by the first violin – we then were left to “reimagine” its contourings, prompted, it seemed, by the harmonies alone, as if the music had almost lost its way in the dark, as if bereaved. Rapturously, the music then reinvented itself, the ensemble heart-warmingly playing into and out of one another’s figurations, leading to the first violin’s “taking wing”, supported by upward arpeggios from the others, allowing the long-breathed statements to drift naturally into a grateful communion of silence at the end.

Came the enigma of the finale’s opening, with cello and viola “asking the question”, leaving the violins to muse over a response to begin with, then burst impassionedly forth as if hanging by a thread waiting for assistance or illumination – a terse three-note response to the opening three-note question, the well-known “Muss es sein?” (Must it be?) phrase which the composer inscribed in the score.

How exhilarating, then, that sudden onrush of joyful energy accompanying the reply, again inscribed by Beethoven in the score – “Es muss sein!” (It must be!) – the release of tension here brought out most tellingly an inevitability, a mark of greatness to do with force of personality, with depth of acceptance and with single-mindedness of purpose! Beethoven’s intoning of a Rasumovsky Quartet-like second melody then threw the vistas open, including the world at large in this paean of acceptance of life! How vigorously the players gave themselves over to this energetic release – and how terrifyingly they then mirrored its sudden reversion to a nightmare of doubt and anxiety with the return of the “Muss es Sein” motif! – the violins sounded particularly “spooked” at the reappearance of “the question”!

Almost defiantly, the allegro reasserted itself, pulling all the music’s strands out of their state of transfiguration and thrusting forth once again. Part of the rehabilitation of surety came with the “Rasumovsky-like” tune, its open-hearted aspect here seeming to include all of us in a kind of anthem-like circle of strength and resolve. Throughout, the musicians remained strong and steadfast, bring forth playing whose confidence uplifted our spirits further, culminating in the enchanting pizzicati that led to the final, emphatic gesture of belief in simply being. Fantastic!

Though I would have happily regarded what we’d experienced as “cup runneth over” stuff, I couldn’t begrudge a young composer’s music the chance of a hearing – and so it was that we heard Natalie Hunt’s 2014 work “Data Entry Groove”, a delicious piece of music-theatre depicting the workings and interactions of computers and operators. A jazzy, nicely off-beat set of opening trajectories involved various cyber-rhythms (Rolf Gjelsten and his ‘cello) and personalised responses to the machine-like routines from the other three players, involving sliding notes and inventive textures and timbres, including a “time for a break” section (violinist Monique Lapins did what looked to my untutored eyes to be some Pilates!)…..returning to their work-routines the players busied themselves with various engagingly off-beat energies, all of which led to a surprise ending of droll and insouciant finality. Definitely a work to enjoy in the “seeing” and “hearing” rather than in the “describing”!