New Zealand String Quartet

Mendelssohn has loomed large for the New Zealand String Quartet in the past year, with Naxos recordings soon to be released. The link with Bach, who had died 60 years before Mendelssohn was born, exists because it was Mendelssohn who brought Bach back to the mainstream of music after decades of neglect. You can hear Mendelssohn consciously adopting Bachian contrapuntal writing in certain pieces, but you can’t push the parallels too far.

At the first concert, in the superb acoustic space of the old university library, cellist Rolf Gjelsten made as persuasive a case as possible for Bach’s influence, with remarks like: “If Beethoven was his father, then Bach was Mendelssohn’s grandfather”; and that he was subject to “the same divine guidance in his music as Bach” – referring to Bach’s Lutheranism and the Jewish Mendelsssohn’s conversion to the same faith.

After the quartet played, with total engagement, several Contrapuncti from The Art of Fugue, the two Opus 44 Quartets of Mendelssohn, though hardly examples of Bach’s rigorous fugal style, are mature and sophisticated with some conspicuous contrapuntal writing.

With particularly sparkling playing from Helene Pohl, they were performances by artists who have become committed Mendelssohnians, absorbing his musical world to make these works appear perhaps greater masterpieces than I had previously thought them.

The best example of  Mendelssohn’s commitment to Bach lay in his Fugue in E flat, another example of the young composer’s superb gifts (he was 19).It was revelatory: Bach with a Beethovenish gloss. Underpinned by impressive contrapuntal mastery, its utterly natural-sounding, rhapsodic character spoke with seriousness and maturity.

Of the same age was the Quartet in A minor, Opus 13, played on Thursday. The contrast with the Fugue could hardly have been greater; driven by a feeling of inevitability in the handling of its richly melodic material, and in the exploiting of the four instruments individually, but above all filled with passionate episodes that spoke of experience of life. The performance displayed all its prodigious strengths, supporting Gillian Ansell’s introductory comment that it was a masterpiece.

Half the second concert was taken by Bach’s great Goldberg Variations, in an arrangement given personally to the Quartet by arranger William Cowdery. This transciption was not as entirely successful as the Art of Fugue. The visual impact of watching four players instead of one tended to separate aurally parts where the writing emphasised vertical harmony. On the other hand, those variations in canonic form sounded more authentic. In themselves the four instruments offered more tonal variety, in pizzicato for example, and we had a better opportunity than usual of hearing the warm tone of second violin Douglas Beilman, in extended passages.

In all, the superb and committed performance was a rewarding experience, from four players whose intuitive grasp of Bach’s style overcame its translation from its familiar sound world.