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Once regarded as “the musical ravings of a deaf madman” the five string quartets included in the Beethoven! Revolution evening with the New Zealand String Quartet made for a passionate, varied performance at the Civic Theatre on Saturday.

A smaller, intimate crowd of all ages – two rows in front of me there was a skateboard parked beside one of the audience members – enjoyed the talent of Helene Pohl and Douglas Beilman, violin, Gillian Ansell, viola, and Rolf Gjelsten, cello.

String Quartet Op59 No1 began the evening with the light, elegant pluck of strings that gave way to the vicious and triumphant crescendo of the Allegro (lively) before descending into the tragic, sombre tones that ended with Theme russe – a Russian folk song about the hardships of life as a soldier.

Those who were new to classical music would have appreciated the half-time instruction by the quartet to listen to the “question” each piece provoked, and promised there was more to come after String Quartet Op95 Quartetto Serioso: “You thought you had heard lows and softs with this piece,” Pohl said at its conclusion. “Just you wait.”

Two hours later, the performance finished with the suspenseful Op59 No3 which rushed to its finale after dramatic pause.

Beethoven began to lose his hearing after his first six string quartets premiered in 1801, and was completely deaf and regarded by some as eccentric, and possibly mad by 1820. However, it was in the last years of his life that some of his most renowned work emerged. His final works were all string quartets, written between 1822 and 1826.

The Chamber Music New Zealand programme pointed out that above Beethoven’s sketches for Opus 59 No3 – written in the summer of 1806 after finally finishing his opera Leonore – these lines were written on the pages: “Just as you plunge yourself here into the whirlpool of society, so in spite of all social obstacles it is possible for you to write opera. Your deafness shall be a secret no more, even where Art is involved.”

Link to original review

BEETHOVEN! The Complete String Quartets 
Revolution series (Programme 4)

• String Quartet No 10 in E♭ major Opus 74 (Harp)
• String Quartet No 11 in F minor Opus 95 (Serioso)
• - Interval -
• String Quartet No 9 in C major Opus 59 No 3 (Razumovsky)

For those of you who weren’t able to attend the middle series programmes, or who would like the pleasure of watching and listening again at your leisure, we will be posting links to recordings of our live webcasts of these programmes later this month.

And of course more to come on the Late Quartets series we are touring around New Zealand in August and September!

These works often have a characteristic emotional intensity as Beethoven sought to come to terms with his increasing deafness.

This programme of distinctive works opened with the Harp quartet, so called because of its use of pizzicato, followed by his Quartetto Serioso, a fascinating work not originally intended for public performance. These two works together provided a powerful first half, beautifully matched by String Quartet in C Opus 59 No 3, which was the featured work in the second half.

The Speirs Centre, a more intimate venue than the grandness of the Regent, seemed to allow the quartet to explore the dynamic and expressive qualities of each work much to the delight of the audience.

The sheer joy these players take from performing with each other was evident throughout this performance, leading to a heightened sense of ensemble awareness that contributed much to the success of this concert.

The New Zealand String Quartet marks a milestone 25 years this year, and it says much of their outstanding musicianship and tenacity that they have made their mark on the international scene.

Yesterday’s concert gave ample evidence as to why this should be, a treat for the audience to savour.

Link to original review

Read the March 2012 issue of Q-notes online

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This quartet is curious and the adagio doesn’t quite seem to fit, however the New Zealand String Quartet’s playing was eloquent and a convincing advocate for it.

Barber’s Dover Beach, a setting of a Matthew Arnold poem for baritone and string quartet, suited Jonathan Lemalu well, his voice focused and contained, his performance detailed and affecting, showing no evidence of reported vocal problems. With ideal balances the NZSQ were the perfect partner.

Earlier a short, Variation 25 For String Quartet by Ross Harris was quirky and uncompromising, the understanding enhanced by three of the quartet playing as a reference the arrangement of Bach’s Goldberg Variation No. 25.

New Zealand-based Chinese pianist and composer Gao Ping in Three Poems By Mu Xin used the voice of Lemalu as a tonal instrument adding vocal inflection and colour via the Chinese language of the sung poems, to balance the quite spare yet beautiful instrumental writing. An attractive new work.

The passion was provided by the final work, a spirited reading of the Shostakovich String Quartet No. 9 in an excellent, intense performance, just missing in places real bite and attack in the cello lines, but a fine performance never-the-less.

Link to original review

Peter Mechen reviews last weekend’s NZ Arts Festival performance by NZSQ and NZ Baritone Jonathan Lemalu.

Link to original review

The New Zealand String Quartet – Helene Pohl, Douglas Beilman (violins), Gillian Ansell (viola), Rolf Gjelsten (‘cello) – with Jonathan Lemalu (bass-baritone)

ROSS HARRIS – Variation 25 for String Quartet

GAO PING – Three Poems by Mu Xin

SAMUEL BARBER – String Quartet Op.11 / Dover Beach Op.3

SHOSTAKOVICH – String Quartet No.9 in E-flat Op.117

Wellington Town Hall
Sunday 4th March 2012

Despite the fact that there really ought to be a moratorium declared on the use of the words “power” and “passion” anywhere and at any time, this Festival Concert featured the New Zealand String Quartet and bass-baritone Jonathan Lemalu in performances that defined the best sense of those very words.

In fact this concert was the latest to somewhat bend the righteous pitch of my on-going complaint regarding the Festival’s paucity of music events – during this and recent previous years. Though they’re relatively thin on the ground this time round, compared with the glory Festival days of, say, the 1990s, I have to say, in all fairness, that the 2012 concerts I’ve attended so far have certainly compensated in sheer quality for their lack of numbers. This one was no exception.

Again, the New Zealand String Quartet was there, at the forefront of a cutting-edge musical experience (following on in like manner from their Beethoven concerts) – I thought this program classic and meaty “Festival” fare, its content and delivery transcending the brain-dead hype of its title, and giving us a treasurable variety of memorable intensities (that description isn’t particularly flash, either, but I think it’s better than you-know-what!).

On the face of things the combination of string quartet and bass-baritone would, I think, pose for the average concertgoer more the immediate prospect of a challenge than out-and-out delight. The moderate attendance seemed to reflect something of this attitude, the organizers optimistically using the Wellington Town Hall for a concert of music whose ethos seemed to suggest more intimate surroundings. Still, the performers in this case were renowned communicators, able to reach out and fill the vistas of most venues with their personalities and musical skills.

As it turned out, the performances seemed to easily draw in all those who were there – and there’s a certain vicarious excitement to be had from experiencing a “large” silence as opposed to a smaller one, which we were all able to enjoy and repeatedly savour, throughout the evening. Our enthusiastic appreciation at the concert’s end for the performers’ efforts belied our actual numbers, I’m sure.

Beginning the concert was local composer Ross Harris’ music, his meditation on one of JS Bach’s “Goldberg” Variations, called simply “Variation 25 for String Quartet”. The Quartet’s Second Violin Douglas Beilman announced before the music began that the group would first play a transcription for string quartet of the original “Goldberg” variation. Presumably the quartet had the approval of the composer to do this – one wonders whether any composer who’d written something inspired by one of the world’s great music masterworks would necessarily want an audience reminded of the original, as it were, cheek-by-jowl! However, in this case, the “putting-together” of the two gave the opening of Ross Harris’s work such a telling ambient context, one fancied one could almost “sense” the direct lines of inspiration and observe something of the creative process of gradually making one’s ideas one’s own.

So, to my way of thinking, hearing the Bach original at the beginning (albeit in a string transcription) was an enrichment regarding what followed – very much in line with what the composer wrote in his accompanying notes about wanting “to pay my respects to the beauty and richness of the music…” It seemed to me at the outset something like a “hall of mirrors” effect, the canonic agglomerations producing a magical overlapping, coloring, intensifying and resounding texture – rather like how one might imagine a note, phrase or theme would be creatively acted upon.

One could sense the composer’s imagination getting into full stride, firstly with a paragraph of intense, stratospherically arched extremities, and then through various scherzo-like passages, the arguments frenetic and the energies ecstatic. After these exertions came a graceful, limpid dance which restored listeners’ equilibriums, the sounds transforming the former intensities of light into rather more dappled and fitful modes. And in much the same way the piece’s linear tensions seemed to melt into floating echoes of their former selves, the first violin then making a somewhat torturous ascent through the textures to conclude the piece, leaving in its wake a stricken viola mid-phrase.

I did think the Quartet’s performance a shade over-wrought at the outset, with some on-the-edge intonations, to my ears, throughout both the theme and the opening measures of the Harris piece – the price one perhaps pays in places for intensity? As the work progressed, the tones centered more readily – and throughout the other works on the program the playing sounded poised and true. The soft playing, in particular, throughout the works featuring a singer, had our sensibilities in thrall with the magic of it all; and bass-baritone Jonathan Lemalu was able to match the instrumentalists’ rapt murmurings throughout such moments with equally haunting tones.

The first of Gao Ping’s settings of three poems of Mu Xin (a writer and artist who died last year in China, aged 84) perfectly illustrated the performers’ skills in evoking the beauty of great stillness – strings and voice together, floating sounds that seemed not of this world. This was a world premiere, an occasion which the programme notes didn’t emphasize, apart from Festival Director Lissa Twomey’s introductory welcome message. The poems were, I believe, sung in Mandarin, the translations suggesting a poet’s finely-wrought sensibility, with occasional erotic overtones (as in the first of the three settings, “My Bountiful Desire”, in which figured lines such as “lips eddy, breast piers, thigh ravine….”).The second settting, equating a bird’s life with happiness, is all pointillistic texturing and evocative calling, while the third, “A HIstory of Love”, begins with a saga-like sense of momentum and movement, rather like a river telling its story in passing. The two previous settings had magical interactions between voice and solo instruments at their conclusions (with violin and ‘cello, respectively) – but this one concluded with some equally haunting falsetto-like singing from Jonathan Lemalu, the words chronicling the passing of time, of youth, of love.

American Samuel Barber’s best-known work is his Adagio for Strings, often played as a commemorative piece, and used in various films (“I couldn’t help it – I kept on imagining helicopters” said my concert-hall neighbour at the end, alluding to the Award-winning film “Platoon”). Usually heard as a work for orchestral strings, here we heard it in its original guise, as part of a String Quartet, the second of three movements (officially there are only two, but to my way of thinking, the return to the material of the opening after the Adagio constitutes a movement of its own, however brief). The performance vividly characterized the volatile nature of the first movement, with its jagged opening and its hymn-like chorale intertwined throughout; while the Adagio’s songful lines here had a spell-binding vibrancy, the climax “built” with inexorable purpose and intensity – amazing stuff from the Quartet, no matter how many times previously one might have heard the piece.

Not heard as often, but a piece whose beauties undoubtedly deserve more attention is “Dover Beach”, Barber’s setting for baritone and string quartet of Matthew Arnold’s poem (I thought there might be a version for voice and string orchestra, which could increase the work’s performance frequency – but there doesn’t seem to be). Again, Jonathan Lemalu’s beautifully-focused soft singing made for pure poetry of sound in tandem with the strings – it struck me how Barber used the voice as a “fifth string” in many places, the vocal line often sharing the phrasings and figurations of the quartet’s. Particularly beautiful was the line “and bring the eternal note of sadness in”, at the conclusion of the music’s first section.

The bass-baritone’s tones sounded less mellifluous under pressure, though the artistry of the singer’s phrasing was evident at “Ah, love, let us be true to one another!” – a fantastic outpouring of emotion, especially telling against the setting’s more hushed moments, the controlled anguish of the final “Where ignorant armies clash by night” an ecstasy of intensity approaching pain. Altogether, I thought it a wonderful performance.

Completing what might be regarded as a line-up of varying intensities, the Quartet addressed the Ninth String Quartet of Dmitri Shostakovich with all of the group’s customary energy and focus. Having heard some of its Shostakovich-playing before, I expected and got a veritable roller-coaster ride of full-on incident and raw emotion, all of the music’s spiked energy, droll humor and bleak melancholy given plenty of amplitude. By the sound of such things, these quartets are surely a body of work that these musicians were born to play – and what we heard confirmed my feelings on the subject.

With a “moments-per-minute” performance such as this one, singling out individual moments can seem to do a violence to the whole – but from the very beginning of the work the Quartet caught the music’s character, intense and claustrophobic, with impulses attempting to energize and lighten the mood leading inevitably to a “screwing-up” of tension and anxiety. Right across the work’s five movements (played without a break) the players readily conveyed that echt-feeling of fatalism regarding humanity’s lot, that “to live is to suffer, and to feel is to invite pain” attitude which continuously informs the pages of this music.

I’m sure the unexpectedness of encountering such richly- and readily-wrought listening experiences played its part in making the occasion for me so truly memorable – a truly “surprised by joy” outcome, a festival concert worthy of the name.

Link to original review

The NZSQ now demonstrate great unanimity, reading each other’s playing, creating ideal balances and weight of tone and sound. They played with vigour, from robust and vibrant, to subtle and delicate in characterful Beethoven.

The Quartet has its own distinctive approach to Beethoven, showing elegance and clarity as well as warmth and vigour, matching the mood of each work.

The last of this opus, Quartet No 6 in B flat major is the remarkable one and they gave a virtuosic performance capturing an effortless quality, judging the harmonies perfectly.

Numbers four and five were equally well performed and the standing ovation was deserved. Now at 25 the NZSQ can truly take its place on the world’s stages.

Link to original review

The six quartets that make up Op.18 are fine works, each with a quite different character and in this, the first of two concerts, the NZSQ gave us the first three in reverse order. The D major quartet (Op.18/3) is a somewhat serene work that saw the players take a little time to warm up.

The second quartet (Op.18/2) in G major does not seem to have a care in the world, and its rich good humour, tempered by a slow movement of eloquent simplicity, was beautifully done.

But the best was reserved for Beethoven’s very first published quartet. This is possibly the finest of all the Op.18 quartets, and was of the highest quality. Right from the arresting opening bars we knew we had heard some very special Beethoven playing. So, I look forward to the second of their Op.18 concerts in the festival, and to the remaining 10 quartets.

Link to original review