New Zealand String Quartet

This is a review of the quartet’s performance for the Wellington Chamber Music Society in November 2004.

The last concert of the Wellington Chamber Music Society’s series presented the New Zealand String Quartet in a programme that has been well honed over the past months.

So it was playing at such a level where comment is confined more to comparisons with earlier recorded or live performances by the most famous ensembles, that to spotting flaws or problematic interpretation.

Their Beethoven quartet caught the ear with illuminating contrasts in phrases taken in turn by different instruments, their care to make every repetition of tunes and scoring subtly different.

Never a hint of monotony that comes from too literal readings of rhythms and bar-lines, such things as shifting accents, understating the obvious – the music’s remarkable individuality and the original touches in these early Beethoven quartets.

The quartet played the middle section of the Adagio with muted, ghostly suspense and the Scherzo sparkled with rhythmic caprices. The complex finale, however, might have failed slightly to capture its wide range of moods; the Melancholy episode might have hinted at a little more pain.

Helene Pohl introduced Berg’s Lyric Suite with a highly entertaining account of its sources in Berg’s love life, helping any hearers-for-the-first-time. It really is time we stopped talking about the Second Viennese School; each is so different.

Berg’s tunes might not be in the mould of Schubert or even Richard Strauss, but familiarity does reveal a lyricist, a communicator, and a performance like this, by players who have themselves absolutely absorbed its sounds and its ways with its material; they had mastered its great technical challenges and offered an engrossing experience through the wide emotional range of its six movements.

Borodin’s quartet opened strikingly, as if we were faced with a sonata for violin and cello with a couple of supporting instruments such is the strength and confidence that is the playing by Helene Pohl and Rolf Gjelsten.

But the balance with Beilman’s violin and Ansell’s viola was soon restored; if there were few insights in the Scherzo, the famous Nocturne shimmered like a full moon over water and the Finale was lit with brimming ideas and brilliant colours that made me wonder afresh at Borodin’s genius.