On the whole Bach’s keyboard works – probably more than anyone else’s – admit of a vast range of interpretations. Composers from Mozart to Stravinsky have sought to illuminate Bach’s contrapuntal complexities by re-scoring his works for expanded forces, thereby giving added dimensions of color and space to his monochromatic keyboard blueprints. Above all two of Bach’s last, greatest, and most encyclopedic works, the so-called “Goldberg Variations” and the “Art of Fugue,” call loudly for adaptations to new media, and repay such experiments richly.

Long beloved of musical connoisseurs, Bach’s “Air with Sundry Variations” won the nickname “Goldberg” thanks to Bach’s student Johann Gottlieb Goldberg, who played them to acclaim during the composer’s lifetime. The variations were later admired by Beethoven, who used them as a model for his benchmark “Diabelli” Variations. In more recent times they burst into the public eye through Glenn Gould’s breathtakingly virtuosic recordings of 1955 and 1981.

The “Goldberg Variations” survey a broad sweep of compositional methods and techniques, from light song styles to learned counterpoint, from staid Renaissance-style polyphony to dazzling instrumental virtuosity. While a keyboard may suffice to bring off these many-sided compositional feats, Bach’s music gains even greater brilliance and clarity when taken up by a group of instruments that give due weight to each of the contrapuntal lines of the musical web. Perhaps no ensemble is more readily equipped to do this than the modern string quartet, whose four constituent instruments handily fit the demands of range and flexibility made by Bach’s intricate counterpoint.

Bach himself was no stranger to such reworkings. He made ensemble transcriptions of his own keyboard works, and conversely he made keyboard reductions of ensemble compositions – including those of other composers. In adapting the “Goldberg Variations” to the string quartet we follow a time-honored tradition of putting great music into the capable hands of those who love it.

Bill Cowdery

William Cowdery is a senior lecturer at Cornell University and musical director and organist of the First Congregational Church, Ithaca, NY. He has taught at Ithaca College, Colgate University, and Keuka College as performer, musicologist, and theorist. Cowdery holds a PhD from Cornell for a dissertation on the early cantatas of JS Bach and has written articles in the New Harvard Dictionary of Music and the Harvard Biographical Dictionary of Musicians (1996), as well as co-editing with Neal Zaslaw The Compleat Mozart (1999).

Using audience participation, the four musicians introduce other illustrated program segments including “Talking instruments”, “Where’s the melody?” and “Recognising moods and emotions in music”. Musical examples range from Gershwin and Scott Joplin to Beethoven, Mendelssohn and Bartók.

What they said:

The event was a huge success..

Lesley Smith, Director, Lopdell House Gallery, venue for a Classics up close concert.

…pitched perfectly…

Audience member

…I liked the interactiveness and comedy – it was child friendly..

Audience member

Quartet members.

Gill Ansell demonstrating instrument to children.

In a one hour program the engaging members of the New Zealand String Quartet introduce a range of musical ideas to a school audience, using audience participation, enjoyable games and lively explanations. All musical excerpts are from the classical string quartet repertoire. There is time for questions from the audience near the end. These programs are suited to a school audience aged 5-11.

Program content

Programs will draw on these modules to make an hour-long session.

Feed the Dog

- for string quartet and audience.
This lively jazz-influenced work by New Zealand composer Jonathan Besser was especially commissioned by the New Zealand String Quartet for performance to and with a school audience, using body and untuned percussion.

Talking instruments

A “talking” violin speaks with the other instruments. Audience participation leads into a section illustrating different kinds of conversations (and even an argument!) in music using a range of short musical examples.

Recognising moods and emotions in music

Audience participation: 6 children from the audience hold up posters which display cartoon characters illustrating specific moods – angry, sad, happy, tender, crazy and scary. Musical excerpts are used and the volunteers and the audience are asked to identify the mood of the music. This activity brilliantly illustrates the different ways people hear music and react to it – it is clear that there is no right answer to the question “what mood or feeling does this music convey?”

Where’s the Melody?

A lively and amusing team game based on the Trio from Beethoven Opus 59#2.
The audience is divided into four groups, each linked with one quartet instrument. They are introduced to the theme of the movement and during a performance must recognise when the melody comes in their instrument and demonstrate this by raising their hands.

Melody, Accompaniment and Textures

This module explores the background and foreground of the music, as in a painting. Students are asked to identify how many instruments are playing the tune at the same time and may be asked to count how many times the motive appears in a musical example.

Richard Nunns.

New Zealand composer Gillian Karawe Whitehead has written two quintets for the New Zealand String Quartet and Taonga Puoro (Māori instruments) specialist Richard Nunns.

These outstanding works, Puhake ki te rangi (“spouting to the skies”) and Hineputehue (“the woman of the sound of the gourd”) have been performed many times in New Zealand, Europe and North America and audiences have found them fascinating, evocative and moving.

Both works are available on the Atoll Records release Puhake ki te rangi, (ACD 107, 2008) a CD set which includes a DVD of the recording session of one of the quintets and further details about the whalebone instruments. Listen to an audio sample.

Programme notes and a biography of the composer provide more details.

What the critics said:

The real eye-opener of this concert and perhaps the most authentic sound of New Zealand came with the last work Puhake ki te rangi for string quartet and Māori instruments by Gillian Karawe Whitehead. For this, the Quartet was joined by Richard Nunns who has spent a lifetime of dedicated research into every aspect of taonga pūoro (Māori traditional instruments). During the interval I had the opportunity of having a close look at some of the instruments carved from whale bones and teeth and albatross bones. They were every bit as beautiful as they sounded. Gillian Karawe Whitehead has a love of whale song as deep as that of Messiaen for birdsong and she has incorporated its sounds into her music. You could sense the voices of these creatures singing through the string playing and the whole work was punctuated by the sounds of the Māori instruments.

Alan Cooper, Aberdeen University, Aberdeen, Scotland – November 10th, 2008

Read reviews:

• Vivid authenticity
• New Zealand String Quartet features composition with Maori instruments
• Sounds of the Māori on whale bones

A still from the Puhake ki te rangi DVD.

A portrayal of the depth and consequence of jealousy and lust, The Kreutzer centres on a man tormented by the haunting presence of his dead wife. Driven to confessing all, we journey into his corrupt and jealous past, to examine the divergent ways men and women often perceive each other.

The Kreutzer is based on the famous Kreutzer Sonata by Beethoven, a novella by Tolstoy and Leoš Janácek’s first string quartet. The Kreutzer unites all three works, breaking the confines between performance genres.

The New Zealand String Quartet joined the cast of The Kreutzer for performance seasons at the Auckland Festival 2009 and the Christchurch Arts Festival 2009. The members of the Quartet became actors in the piece, while playing Janacek’s first string quartet.

The Kreutzer is a Stage Left production. For more information or to book this show, go to The Kreutzer website.

The Story

The New Zealand String Quartet on stage with Vadim Ledogorov.

A Man on a train who has accused music of being the “most refined form of sensual lust” is tormented by a String Quartet. They return him to a drawing room, the scene of a crime. He is haunted by the presence of a woman – a Pianist, Dancer and Wife. Supplied with a camera and evidence of his past life he tries to save us from a voyeur’s fate. Love, marriage, the arts, education and family are not excused from his scrutiny. All that is beautiful is tainted and corrupted.

The String Quartet is unmoved by his nightmarish confessional and his moralising crumples. The musicians are relentless in driving him towards a re-enactment of the night his Wife and a visiting Violinist played Beethoven’s masterpiece, the Kreutzer Sonata. We learn how appreciation turned to jealousy and music became the catalyst that lead him to murder the woman he loved.

The audience

The Kreutzer has cross-over appeal. For theatre audiences, technically complex chamber music becomes accessible and sexy. Conversely, for chamber music aficionados, the production presents revered works in an entirely unique and physical way.

What the critics said:

…electrifying theatre.

Timothy Jones, The Christchurch Press

…marvelous integration of music, theatre, dance and design.

Raewyn White, NZ Herald

The New Zealand String Quartet gave a passionate, idiomatic performance of the ..Janacek Quartet..

Rod Biss, New Zealand Opera News

Haydn’s Seven Last Words of Our Saviour on the Cross was commissioned for performance during Lent. Traditionally, the words or phrases (taken from all four gospels) are spoken, followed by a reading from the gospels, a homily or meditation on those words, then by the music. Since its composition, this work has continued to form a basis for presentations that invite audiences to consider the deeper issues that continue to affect mankind.

As part of the celebrations around the 200^th anniversary of Haydn’s death, Chamber Music New Zealand was keen to offer this rarely-performed work in concert, played by the New Zealand String Quartet. The opportunity to present it in association with specially commissioned words led to the idea of using poetry from New Zealand. Wellington poet Dinah Hawken was asked to respond to the challenge of providing words to accompany this music, and wrote eight thought-provoking poems which were read by the poet during the performances.

The idea of incorporating visual images grew out of collaborative discussions between Chamber Music New Zealand and the New Zealand String Quartet. Nigel Brown’s figurative representations which speak so strongly of New Zealand were considered to be ideal for this project, and Nigel produced eight lithographs in the series.

In order to pull the three elements together it was felt that another creative partnership was required. Director Sara Brodie, along with video designer Andrew Bretell, designed a presentation that enhances and illuminates the messages inherent in the music, the words and the art works to create a contemporary New Zealand setting for this timeless music.

I was both delighted and daunted to be asked to write this sequence of poems for Chamber Music NZ. Listening to Haydn’s meditative and dramatic music, reading the gospel accounts of the crucifixion, thinking about the symbolic nature of the cross and looking out from my desk in Paekakariki over pohutukawa to the sea – all these experiences have entered the poems. My hope is that the distilled language of spoken poetry will contribute its own depth, stimulation, and a New Zealand tone, to The Seven Last Words played by the String Quartet.

From poet Dinah Hawken.

Excerpt from the poems:

(Prologue)
And a cross? Is it the wrong answer
Or is it the kiss we send out to make
light of our love? Is it the crossing
Of my standpoint and your viewpoint
or an intersection with no lights
in a foreign city? Some say it is simply
The centre of the four directions, the place
We return to and most want to be.
Dinah Hawken

I paint from what I know, and my approach to Haydn and his Seven Last Words was to bring it to New Zealand in a visual sense, but retain its meditative thoughtful and timeless aspects. The arches [in the paintings] echo Haydn’s control but are bent in a contemporary way at the end; in a way that is not foreign to the surprises in the music. The text though is informal, in a way the Classical period avoids. Life goes on upfront, with musicians to the fore.

Christ is a series of possibilities found in ourselves – in how we live and what questions we ask; both in history and the now!

New Zealand has a rural, pastoral aspect that is specific with flax and tree ferns and kereru, but it is also linked to the barbed wire, struggle and fires of world conflict we are never far from.

We are all human.

From visual artist Nigel Brown.

Seven Last Words by Nigel Brown.

To view Nigel’s set of eight extraordinary works visit the Papergraphica website. These works are available to buy as a complete set of eight, or as individual works.

What the critics said:

Simple setting a perfect match for music, poems

John Button, Dominion Post

Barely a note or rest were out of place; there was an utter unanimity of purpose.

William Dart, NZ Herald

More reviews of the 2009 multi-disciplinary performances of Seven Last Words http://2009.chambermusic.co.nz/artists/185.php

New Zealand string quartet width Michael Houstoun.

The New Zealand String Quartet’s French Connections series in 2008 presented two captivating programmes illustrating the sensuous qualities of French music. The Quartet performed two programmes of beguiling music by Fauré, Debussy, and Ravel, and their successors Henri Dutilleux and Debussy-inspired Japanese composer, Toru Takemitsu. For Fauré’s Piano Quartet they were joined by acclaimed New Zealand pianist Michael Houstoun.

The breath-taking use of musical colour, texture, rhythm and imagery in the music of Debussy and Ravel was profoundly influential in the 20th century. Each composer wrote only one string quartet and both works have become popular classics of the chamber repertoire.

Takemitsu, a major Japanese composer of the twentieth century, describes his own music as “a fragrant and tranquil garden where a listener might stroll” – a seductive image for the music of this special concert series.

Programme 1 (with Michael Houstoun)

Dutilleux String Quartet, Ainsi le nuit, (1976)
Ravel String Quartet in F (1902-03)
Fauré Piano Quartet No. 1 in C minor Opus 15 (1876-9)

Programme 2

Takemitsu A Way a Lone for string quartet (1981)
Ravel Sonata for violin and cello (1920-22)
Debussy String Quartet in G minor

What the critics said:

…the refinement and delicacy of the players’ palette brought a special hush over the audience.

William Dart The NZ Herald

…inspirational…..energetic and adventurous.

Margot Hannigan, Nelson Mail

…an impressive performance, projecting poise and balance that captivated the listener.

Peter Williams, Hawkes Bay Today

And there was Mendelssohn – the brilliant young composer, romantic and passionate, whose lifelong obsession with the music of Bach shaped his own career and inspired him to reveal it to the world.

In a New Zealand tour in 2007, the New Zealand String Quartet brought Bach and Mendelssohn together in two special programmes and revealed the bond between them – the mesmeric counterpoint of Bach’s famous Art of Fugue and the genius of his monumental Goldberg Variations with the unforgettable chamber music of Mendelssohn, which celebrated the influence of Bach and carried it into a new century.

Bach and Mendelssohn.

Programmes

Programme One

• J S Bach The Art of Fugue Contrapuncti 1, 2, 3 and 4
• Mendelssohn String Quartet Opus 44 No 1 in D
• J S Bach The Art of Fugue Contrapuncti 5, 7 and 9
• Mendelssohn Fugue Opus 81 No 4 (1827)
• Mendelssohn String Quartet Opus 44 No 3 in E flat

Programme Two

• Mendelssohn Capriccio Opus 81 No 3
• Mendelssohn String Quartet Opus 13 in a minor
• J S Bach Goldberg Variations (arr. William Cowdery)
  Read more about this special arrangement

What the critics said:

…intuitive grasp of style… the superb and committed performance was a rewarding experience.

Lindis Taylor Dominion Post

…an unprecedented musical experience…[with] each musician intensely contributing to the thrill.

Margot Hannigan, Nelson Mail

…playing of splendid clarity, poise and balance, making a telling climax to a memorable two-concert series.

Peter William, Hawkes Bay Today

Joseph Haydn.

2009 marked 200 years since the death of Joseph Haydn, a composer who changed the course of Western classical music through his “invention” of the string quartet. For its annual series tour the New Zealand String Quartet prepared two special programmes of discovery and celebration to honour a composer who brought new heights of expression and individuality to chamber music.

Programme one – Haydn Discovery

This innovative programme is a unique tribute to Haydn the adventurer – a musical journey of discovery through his long creative life, illustrated by excerpts from his string quartets from Opus 1 to Opus 103 and scripted readings illuminating his life and creative process.

What the critics said:

Twenty Haydn movements …were elegantly punctuated by illuminating comments from the composer, his contemporaries and the writers of the time.

William Dart, The NZ Herald

..brilliantly researched” and “an outstanding spoken and performance resumé of the composer’s life and string quartet music, completely entrancing the capacity audience.

Peter Williams, Hawkes Bay Today

…[the Quartet’s playing was] consistently characterful and engaging” and “their story-telling and detailing in words and music [exerted] an ever-increasing fascination throughout the evening.

Peter Mechen, Middle C

Programme two – Haydn Celebration

For this programme the Quartet has selected four of Haydn’s greatest and most beloved string quartets from different periods in his life, showing the variety and expressive power he brought to the medium.

• Quartet in D Major Opus 64 No 5, “The Lark”
• Quartet in G Minor Opus 74 No 3 “The Rider”
• Quartet in F Minor Opus 20 No 5
• Quartet in G Major Opus 77 No 1 “Compliments”

What the critics said:

…stunningly beautiful…intelligent interpretation [and] compelling sense of togetherness.

Ruth Allison, Nelson Mail

…overall superb quality that earned total admiration from appreciative listeners.

Peter Williams, Hawkes Bay Today

…vital intelligence…crisp excellence…

Marian Poole, Otago Daily Times

Naxos CD 8.570002, 2009

New Zealand String Quartet

Mendelssohn’s quartets exhibit a remarkable blend of fantasy, emotion and intellectual rigour, allied to an insider’s expertise in writing for strings. The best performances, it seems to me, give due weight to each aspect.

The New Zealand String Quartet clearly love this music, and their strong sense of internal balance allows them to bring out many telling details that often go unnoticed: one example occurs just before the end of the first movement of the Quartet in E flat where a final recall of the second theme is accompanied by double-stopped cello pizzicati; given extra emphasis here, these dark tones cast a deeper shadow over the coda’s E flat radiance. In the same quartet’s finale, which can seem rather superficial, the New Zealanders’ confidence as ensemble players permits a flexible approach; the rhythmic momentum is never destroyed, but bends a little so that the characters of the different motifs can be enhanced.

Whenever Mendelssohn’s ardent, Romantic temperament comes to the fore, these players respond. Their passionate finale of Op 13 may not quite have the intensity of the Leipzig Quartet’s, but, at a slightly more measured tempo, the focus here is rather on expressive detail. Conversely, in Op 44 this version may not rival the rich tonal variety of the Eroica Quartet, with its historical approach, but maintains more forcefully the music’s vigorous impetus, while keeping that essential warmth of expression that’s missing from the brilliant, energetic, but dispassionate Pacifica Quartet.

With one more volume to come, this promises to be an outstanding set.

Duncan Druce