Exotic worlds of sound electrify soul

What a joy to leave the winter’s day and step into the sound worlds created by the New Zealand String Quartet. I had been very much looking forward to the Shostakovich String Quartet No 7 and I was not disappointed. What a work! Written in 1960 to commemorate the death of the composer’s wife in 1954, the music explores the fabric of life without the presence of a loved one.

Shostakovich expresses the nature of this kind of loss, which cannot be something one gets over, but transforms instead into companion emotion that informs every aspect of life thereafter. Quartet No 7 explores a new musical dimension integrated by a cyclic design of returning motifs suggesting the repeated questioning of the bereaved about what has happened to the living woman he married. As one commentator describes the second movement, “This is music of another world whose strange desolation can only be inhabited by ghosts.” The music was electrified by the rich communal tone produced by the Quartet. My ears were in ecstasy as each voice was met by the next instrument, or blended with the others to create a curtain of throbbing sound.

Toru Takemitsu’s (1930-1996) work A Way A Lone was a new discovery for me and a great treat to hear. The composer identified an aesthetic connection with the Irish author James Joyce and this is reflected in his distinctive linear compositional style. Takemitsu’s music supposedly evokes the movement of the individual through a Japanese garden but as I listened with closed eyes, I found myself propelled by the amazing colliding tonalities into a slightly wilder garden reminiscent of Lennon and McCartney’s “Cellophane flowers of yellow and green, towering over your head.” Who needs LSD when you can experience live music composed using such trippy textures, patterns and colours with interweaving, compelling gestures in the complex string writing – and all played so beautifully.

In an excellent piece of programming, the last work was Robert Schumann’s Quartet in A, Opus 41 No 3. The opening movement suggested unmitigated sunshine and made a satisfying contrast with the dark intensity of the Shostakovich quartet and the harmonic complexities of Takemitsu’s piece. Clara Schumann, for whom the music was composed as a 23rd birthday present, described the three quartets in this opus as “new and, at the same time, lucid, finely worked, and always in quartet idiom”. The contrapuntal pleasures in the second movement were followed by the singing melodies of the third movement, with some glorious moments on the viola, and the final dance-flavoured movement built the energy of the work to a fitting climax.

Helene Pohl and Douglas Beilman on violins, Gillian Ansell on viola and Rolf Gjelsten on cello filled the Fitters Workshop with exquisite music reminding us how powerful a small ensemble of dedicated musicians can be and how successful in elevating the listener to another plane.