New Zealand String Quartet

A stop-off in Göttingen – the New Zealand String Quartet gives a guest performance at the Goethe Institute. The four exceptional, world-class musicians that make up the New Zealand String Quartet gave a performance at Göttingen’s Goethe Institute on Thursday, making for an unforgettable evening for their audience.

German-American Helene Pohl (first violin), her countryman Douglas Beilman (second violin), New Zealander Gillian Ansell (viola) and Canadian cellist Rolf Gjelsten have been conquering the world’s great stages since 1994. During their European tour this year, they stopped off in Göttingen, a special delight for Helene Pohl, whose parents have their roots in this city. Her joy at a performance here on home ground could hardly have been more obvious, and the quartet’s performance during the two-hour, completely sold-out concert in the Fireplace Room of the Fridtjof Nansen House deserved well and truly to be called a “musical sensation”.

From the opening bars of Joseph Haydn’s Quartet in B flat major, op. 76/4 (Sunrise), the players managed to captivate their audience with an almost hypnotic presence. Their sublime playing revealed itself to be an incessant common dialogue despite all technical challenges, and the result was a veritable feast of expressive, creative power and unrestrained life energy in which the four prominent artists performed as one. With emphatic passion, Helene Pohl made her violin sing, blending the concentrated seriousness of the second violin, the restrained elegance of the viola and the temperamental esprit of the cello into a unified sound body.

Diabolically furious

The programme, in which one highlight segued seamlessly into another, left the audience hardly any time to catch its breath. The classical grandezza of the Haydn quartet was followed by five diabolically furious dances by Erwin Schulhoff from 1925, which, thanks to the musicians’ incandescent performance style, did not fail to achieve the effect intended by their creator – Schulhoff sought to provoke, not soothe. But the third movement of Beethoven’s A Minor Quartet, op. 132, a work that pushed the envelope of all chamber music dimensions, was a completely different matter. Here again, the artists shone with deepest dedication to the beautiful, spherical serenity of overpowering harmonies, before the unforgettable evening ended with Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy’s op. 81 as an encore, with tumultuous applause.