The tutors are the members of the internationally acclaimed New Zealand String Quartet, all of whom are dedicated teachers as well as performers. They are delighted that accomplished New Zealand pianist Diedre Irons is available to work with them in the role of piano tutor again this year.

The Summer School is the first event in 2012, a special year for the New Zealand String Quartet as it celebrates its 25th anniversary. The year is being marked by an exciting range of activities including a national tour of the complete string quartets of Beethoven and international profiling in London in March at the innovative new Kings Place venue.

This year 25 highly skilled young musicians from around New Zealand are attending the Summer School. The students form seven chamber ensembles, each group working in depth on a work that they will then present in the final public concerts on Saturday 11 February. Included will be music by Beethoven, Dvořák, Mendelssohn, Shostakovich and Schubert.

A previous recipient commented that it was great to work with an established group such as the New Zealand String Quartet, ‘not only because all of our tutors are extremely knowledgeable but also because they constantly work on the repertoire together’.

This year’s school runs from 3 to 11 February.

Final public concerts will be held at 4pm and 8pm on Saturday 11 February with an admission cost of $10 per person.

Daily masterclasses are open to the public free of charge. Sessions run from:

• 8pm on Saturday 4 February
• 5.15pm on Sunday 5 February and Monday 6 February
• 3.00pm on Tuesday 7 February
• 5.15pm on Thursday 9 February and Friday 10 February

All concerts and masterclasses will be held at the Main Auditorium, Nelson School of Music, 48 Nile Street, Nelson.

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“This Award is the icing on the cake for us this year” said first violinist Helene Pohl. “We’ve had a very busy year performing in New Zealand and overseas and have been able to perform many of the works on the CD to international audiences, where they’ve been enthusiastically received.”

The musicians leave today for a North American tour and the work Exitus by Michael Norris from the award-winning CD will feature in these concert programmes.

For more information about the CD.

New Zealand’s favourite chamber musicians will be sharing Beethoven’s complete set of String Quartets in six wonderful programmes around thirteen centres in twenty-seven concerts.

Festivities begin with two concerts in the New Zealand International Arts Festival in Wellington at the end of February. These will be an exclusive presentation of the first pair of BEETHOVEN! concerts, entitled The Age of Enlightenment.

Rosemary Hudson from Dunedin is one of many who have booked for the whole cycle. She’ll hear three concerts in Dunedin, two at the New Zealand International Arts Festival in Wellington and the sixth in Christchurch.

“I went to the last Beethoven cycle by the Quartet in Dunedin about a decade ago and have never forgotten it”, she says. “It was a highlight of my concert-going ‘career’, just magical. They played the quartets so beautifully and I also enjoyed their commentaries – they had something new to bring to each one. I can’t imagine anything better to celebrate their anniversary! And I thought it would be rather fun to travel to take in the whole cycle. I’ve never been to the Festival in Wellington so I’m looking forward to that and will go to some other shows too.”

Chamber Music New Zealand will take the Quartet on the road in April and May for ten concerts of the composer’s middle period quartets, two programmes called Revolution and the cycle will be completed in August and September with twelve concerts of The Late Quartets.

“Hearing the complete cycle”, says cellist Rolf Gjelsten “allows the listener to follow Beethoven’s development from the daring and virtuosity of his earlier works through the heroic expression of the middle period to the total mastery and profound story telling of the late quartets.”

The BEETHOVEN! cycle is a partnership project between the New Zealand String Quartet and Chamber Music New Zealand, in association with the NZ International Arts Festival.

• More information
• BEETHOVEN! programmes
• Concert locations
• How to book tickets
• Enjoy a performance of Beethoven by the Quartet

Creative New Zealand acknowledged the Quartet as one of its “leadership” organisations 10 months ago and Rose is looking forward to working with the musicians to enhance their role in the development of chamber music in New Zealand, including their important work as teachers and coaches of young musicians. “The Quartet has also developed a strong international profile in recent years” she says, “and as well as their many performances in New Zealand I’m keen to enhance their international reputation even further” .

Rose replaces Elizabeth Kerr who has managed the Quartet for five years and will continue to work on two significant 2012 projects for the organisation until April next year.

Two top New Zealand singers based in London, Jonathan Lemalu and Madeleine Pierard, and Māori instrument specialist Richard Nunns are featured in the mini-festival, performing works with the Quartet by New Zealand composers Gao Ping, Ross Harris and Gillian Karawe Whitehead. Works with multi-cultural influences by composers John Psathas, Jack Body and Michael Norris will also be featured.

Kings Place, which opened in 2008, is a state-of-the-art performance space and has an innovative programming concept, turning over the curation of its weekly programmes to the artists themselves.

The New Zealand at Kings Place story began in 2008, when Kings Place invited the New Zealand String Quartet, in London during a nine-concert European tour, to offer a group of programmes for a future week. The result is New Worlds: New Perspectives, three programmes of music with the theme of migration across oceans, centuries and cultural boundaries. “The musicians and composers of our concert series have traveled between an old world and a new one, have explored ancient and modern cultures and bring a contemporary view to folk and classical traditions,” says Helene Pohl, first violinist of the Quartet. “We’ve chosen to contrast fascinating new works by New Zealand composers, drawing on cultures as diverse as Greek, Chinese and Māori, with the spiritual journeys of Beethoven and Schubert.”

Peter Millican, visionary Chief Executive of Kings Place, was captured by the range of influences in the programmes. “King’s Place is very much looking forward to your week in 2012,” he wrote recently. “It is particularly appropriate that in the [London] Olympic year we are welcoming such an outstanding quartet from New Zealand.”

To complement the Quartet’s programmes, the short festival includes two other sessions. In the regular Kings Place “Words on Monday” slot, three generations of New Zealand poets, Fleur Adcock, Bill Manhire and performance poet Tusiata Avia, will read from their work, demonstrating what Manhire has described as New Zealand’s cultural shift “from old Europe to the new Pacific”.

And for the experimental “Out Hear” session, composer and director of Stroma Michael Norris has curated a programme called The Body Electric, in which a younger generation of New Zealand composers including Norris himself, John Coulter, Dugal McKinnon, John Croft, Alexandra Hay and Chris Black explore concepts of body and space by combining live musicians with electronics and multimedia.

The programmes take place between 26 and 31 March 2012.

Large audiences in historic church venues at festivals in Lichfield and Buxton followed the London concerts and the tour continued  at the Cambridge Summer Music Festival and the Petworth Festival.  So well-received was the Quartet’s programme of music by Bartok, Jack Body and Beethoven in Petworth that their concert sold out two months in advance and the festival scheduled a second, also proving popular.

Festival directors praised the Quartet’s performances, the City of London Festival acknowledging their “excellent contribution” to the programme, the Oundle Festival describing their concert as “fantastic” and commenting on how “moving” their playing was for the audience, and the Petworth Festival praising the Quartet as “magnificent” in a “really lovely concert”.

The tour finished at the Holt Festival in Norfolk on 26th July, after which the musicians headed to Canada for nine more festival concerts in Ottawa and Parry Sound.