New Zealand String Quartet

Star rating: ****

It’s a long way to come, but the New Zealand Quartet has been here before. Wednesday’s concert, under the auspices of the Edinburgh Contemporary Arts Trust, was a fascinating international mix, incorporating music from New Zealand; some lightning sketches by the Chinese Tan Dun, at one time the BBC SSO’s visiting composer-conductor; Shostakovich’s slow, morbid Quartet No 13; and two samples of ethnic Greek music in Kiwi transcriptions.

In all, the players – one of those modern quartets where everyone stands except the cellist – seemed in their element. Though the hit of the evening was bound to be the closing item, Gillian Karawe Whitehead’s Puhake Ki Te Rangi, a celebration of whales and their ululations, requiring a selection of Māori instruments and their veteran exponent, Richard Nunns, the rest of the programme formed a resourceful preamble, with Shostakovich as its centrepiece, that unfolded with slow, stark, unremitting intensity.

After this, the changing palette of Tan Dun’s Eight Colours provided light relief, as had the exotic Greek pulsations of John Psathas’s Kartsigar earlier in the programme. But the whale piece vibrantly lived up to its name, which meant “spouting to the skies”. The Māori instruments, mostly made of whale or albatross bone, were blown and tapped with what seemed vivid authenticity, blending and contrasting with the sound of the strings, themselves employed by New Zealander Gillian Whitehead to the most evocative effect.