New Zealand String Quartet

If the standard of performances in the coming week’s celebration of the music of New Zealand matches that established yesterday by the excellent New Zealand String Quartet in the launch concert of the festival, then audiences are in for a treat.

You would expect a full-time quartet to be a coherent, unanimous ensemble with a cultivated ability to interact instinctively and indeed second-guess each other. Experience, however, often proves otherwise. But this brilliant foursome not only possesses musical extra-sensory perception, but also has a distinctive sound, polished with a lean, wiry fibre to its core.

And such a level of brainpower behind their playing that all three works in the opening concert came across with clarity of structure and unforced presentation. That, above all, was the underlying strength in their delivery of Lyell Cresswell’s large-scale piano quintet And Every Sparkle Shivering, in which the group was joined by virtuoso pianist Richard Beauchamp. This stunning piece unifies its mosaic structure with two strong elements: a ravishing, murmuring love song, and wildly rhythmic dance music. The precise characterisation of both of these by the group was pellucid. A tour de force of performance can’t say better than that.

Equally marked by intelligent playing were the performances of Iain Matheson’s commissioned piece, How Long Things Last, and John Psathas’s eastern influenced Abhisheka, two very different pieces, coincidentally almost related by a common structure, each alternated chordal figures with contrasting ideas.

Matheson’s seemed to explore, in an abstract way, the evolution of full-blown lyricism from fragmentary notes, while Psathas’s turned a florid, exotic melody inside out across the group to examine its expressive potential. Superior music from a superb outfit.