New Zealand music

The New Zealand String Quartet has a strong commitment to performance of New Zealand compositions and is well-known for including music from New Zealand in its concert programmes. The examples here are just a few from a growing and diverse list of exciting new works.

Jack Body – Three Transcriptions for String Quartet
Three Transcriptions is a collection of three different musics which Jack Body transcribed especially for the Kronos Quartet.

Gareth Farr – Mondo Rondo
Gareth Farr’s three movement work Mondo Rondo takes its title from its first movement, the later movements being Mumbo Jumbo and Mambo Rambo. Mondo Rondo conjures up the image of Farr as a musical magpie, building a colourfully wonky nest at frenetic speed, and all manner of sounds can almost be identified as they flash past.

Ross Harris – String Quartet No. 3 (Variations on Blood Red Roses)
The choice of the simple waltz Blutrote Rosen was made for many reasons – most obviously the reference to a horrific context. The banality and crudeness of the tune were also ideal for the deconstruction and fragmentation the music undergoes during the course of the piece.

Gao Ping – Bright Light and Cloud Shadows
Bright Light and Cloud Shadows was commissioned by the Adam Chamber Music Festival and given its World Premiere by the New Zealand String Quartet at the Festival in Nelson in January 2007.

John Psathas – Kartsigar (2004) for String Quartet
Both movements of this work began as transcriptions of recorded performances by two of Greece’s living master-musicians, clarino player Manos Achalinotopoulos and percussionist Vagelis Karypis. The transcriptions are based on two separate recordings of a traditional taximi entitled Kartsigar.

Gillian Karawe Whitehead – Puhake ki te rangi
Puhake ki te rangi, which translates as “spouting to the skies”, is a celebration of whales, and was written late in 2006 for the New Zealand String Quartet and Richard Nunns as a project undertaken while Gillian Whitehead was the Creative New Zealand/New Zealand School of Music composer-in-residence.

Gillian Karawe Whitehead – Hine-pu-te-hue
Hine-pu-te-hue translates literally as “the woman of the sound of the gourd”, and she is the Maori goddess of peace. The work was written in 2001, at the time of President Bush’s State of the Union address shortly before the invasion of Afghanistan, and suggests the fragility rather than the celebration of peace, particularly in a pre-European environment.