Reviewed by John Daly-Peoples
Mt Eden Chamber Music Festival
Eden Arts
Mt Eden Village Centre Church
September 6 – 8
Reviewed by John Daly-Peoples
Now in its ninth year the Mt Eden Chamber Music Festival organised by the local community arts group, Eden Arts has presented high quality performances by some of the country’ s leading musical groups and major talent including NZ Trio and NZ Barok.
These concerts have been programmed by Simeon Broom, the Festival’s Artistic Director who is a violinist with the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra and Cathy Manning of Eden Arts.
Its most recent concert series featured Shostakovich’s Piano Trio No 2, Dvorak’s Piano Concerto No 3, Debussy’s Sonata in G Minor for violin and Piano, Brahms’ Piano Quartet No 3 as well as a concert of works for trombone quartet including pieces by Beethoven, Bruckner, Chaulk, Webern Apon and Seroki.
The four major works on the programme all see composers responding to major crisis in their lives – personal, domestic and political, using music as a means of self-expression as well as communicating their ideas and emotions.
The Shostakovich Piano Trio and Dvorak Piano Concerto were both played by Xing Wang (piano), James Jin (violin) and Dominic Lee (cello) giving each of the works a very different tone.
The Shostakovich was written in 1944 following on from his Symphony No 7 which was his reaction to the horrors of the Second World War and the Siege of Leningrad and which was his personal expression of his resistance to fascism.
Some of these same aspects are to be found in the Piano Trio along with reference to his friend Ivan Sollertinsky who had recently died and who is credited with introducing Shostakovich to new music including the work of Mahler.
The opening, chilling tomes of the Lee’s cello were followed by the lamenting sounds of Jin’s violin and the dignified piano of Wang. The trio became more animated with the anguished conversation between the strings set against the ruthless tones of the piano. Here the strings seemed to be particularly raw expressing anger and torment.
The second movement began with a slightly more joyful tone with its dance-like melody but this soon became more excited with a harsh pizzicato sequence from the strings, soaring above the pianos more restrained sounds.
There followed a death knell, the cello paying homage to Sollertinsky with a passionate voice.
In the final section Shostakovich used a Jewish melody but the celebratory nature of the work was played as a dirge, full of an increasingly frantic distress.
The undertones of the mournful cello and the tense violin become something of a metaphor for the lost and abandoned. Here Lee took on an active performance role lifting himself out of his seat in an agitated manner.
There is also a dark and brooding element in Dvorak’s Piano Trio which may be a reflection of the composer’s grief over the recent death of his mother and the early death of three of his children.
The group displayed an understanding of the work with its subtle nuances of tone and its dramatic chiaroscuro giving the work an alternating drama, liveliness and introspection.
The opening of the work was filled with swirling eddies of sound conjuring up images of landscape that he evoked in many of his previous works. Here the , the grandeur of the vision expressed a contemplative mood.
The work was full of passage of tight precision and the trio was able to express the passion in music with some delightful passages such as the springlike opening of the second movement as well as some unexpected inflections and intricate rhythms.
The three instrument developed and expanded these early melodies creating some languorous vistas with some of the melodies beautifully expressed by Lees’s cello which led to an unexpected conclusion.
Much of the playing of the violin and cello took on an elegance which saw the two instruments interweaving in a conversation which alternated between the formal and the combative.
Debussy wrote the Sonata in G Minor for violin and Piano in 1917 at a time when France was grieving its losses in The Great War and at a time when the composer was aware of his imminent death,
Simeon Broom’s violin soared and floated above Katherine Austin’s piano which went from the dramatic to the lethargic, her intrusions like a scudding cloud and Broom’s violin explored some rapturous melodies.
The second movement brought some colourful and sprightly dancing melodies from Broom with some jittery playing from Austin, the instruments vying for innovation and spectacle.
Austin delivered brilliant passages of insistent piano into which Broom inserted a bird-like romanticism and then some marvellous playing involving double stopping and intricate playing.
For the Brahms Piano Quartet No 3 Austin and Broom were joined with Helen Lee (viola) and James Tennant (cello). The work is filled with drama, yearning and reflection as he was close to Robert Schumann and was shocked by his mentors attempted suicide. But he was also drawn to Schumann’s wife Clara and probably felt conflicted about that relationship.
The work also captures much of his romantic angst which can also be seen in Goethe’s “Young Werther” and the paintings of Caspar Friedrich.
The opening sobbing sounds of the instruments and the plucked sounds of the viola suggesting tears set the scene for the work with frantic strings morphing into a more contemplative mood.
There were passages where the piano alluded to joyful times as well as distant love. Then the strings erupted is waves of sound suggesting the turbulent life and mind of the young composer. There were also passionate outbursts creating an image of the lonely hero caught in a storm.
Many of the passage see Brahms creating a sense of light and dark, joy and sadness with soulful conversations between the cello and violin as well as a delicate romanticism carefully outlined by Austins piano.
The work ends with some robust playing as the instruments seemed to spiral out of control with some dynamic connections between the four players before moving onto a reflective sequence and terse conclusion.
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