NZSQ’s ‘Woven Pathways’ Tour Wraps Up In Wellington

Monday, 18 September 2023, 4:29 am
Article: howard davis

NZSQ’s ‘Woven Pathways’ Tour Wraps Up In Wellington

The NZSQ concluded their national tour of ‘Woven Pathways’ in Wellington last week with two stunning performances that reaffirmed their position as NZ’s premier chamber music ensemble.

The first at St Peter’s Church was capped by their final show at the Public Trust Hall, both venues providing crystal clear acoustics and an intimacy that audiences may have come to take for granted, but nevertheless impresses with each new iteration. Helen Pohl’s 1730 Guarneri and Monique Lapins’ 1784 Lorenzo Storiioni violins were perfectly attuned to Gillian Ansell’s 2619 Nicole Matai viola and Rolf Gjelsten’s 1705 Venetian Grancesco Golfer cello. Together they produced two evenings of wonderfully varied and stimulating music making.

The following observations are informed by Corrina Connor's highly informative programme notes. The first programme - “painting musical portraits of the human experience” - opened with Tabea Squire’s ‘I Danced, Unseen,’ originally a 2020 collaboration between Ballet Collective Aotearoa and choreographer Loughlan Prior, but functioning perfectly as an independent work. A questing solo viola line introduces a sense of profound contentment found in being alone to discover a space for “expression without scrutiny.”

This was followed by Hungarian composer Béla Bartók’s sixth and final String Quartet No.6, written in Switzerland August 1939. Its composition came at a tumultuous time in the composer's life, as war clouds gathered and his mother lay on her deathbed. With the outbreak of WWII and his mother's illness, Bartók returned to Budapest, where he finished the quartet in November. Following his mother's death, he decided to leave with his family for the US. Additionally, he had begun to experience discomfort in his right shoulder, which may have been an early sign of the blood disorder that would eventually take his life.

Each of the four movements begins with a mournful and melancholy Mesto, built around a desolate chromatic figure. The second movement’s jarring and distorted fanfare was conceived as a biting satire on militarism, while the third movement’s lurching ‘Burletta’ rhythms alludes, somewhat harshly rather than nostalgically, to the ballroom dances of a rapidly disintegrating Mitteleuropa. The fourth Mesto returns as an extend diminuendo, descending appropriately enough into a shadowy vision of increasingly bleak darkness. Bartók initial sketches reveal he intended the last movement to have a quick, Romanian folk dance-like flavour with an ‘aksak’ rhythmic character, but he soon abandoned this plan, whether motivated by pure compositional logic or despair at the impending death of his mother and the unfolding catastrophe of the war.

Schubert’s ‘String Quartet in A Minor’ is also constructed in four interrelated movements. In 1824, the composer remarked on a planned set of three quartets, but only managed to complete two. Although his D Minor Quartet, (‘Death and the Maiden’) is better known, the A Minor inhabits a similarly spectral realm of savage drama. Like the D Minor Quartet, ‘Rosamunde’ is also closely connected to Schubert’s lieder, filled with musical revenants and the ephemeral presence of wordless songs.

The texture of the first movement is not only reminiscent of the melancholy theme from one of Schubert's earliest songs, ‘Gretchen am Spinnrade,’ but also refers to ‘Schöne Welt, wo bist du?’ Although the contours of the first violin’s melody and the accompanying hypnotic obligato may remind listeners of Goethe’s famous poem, it is not a direct quotation, but rather a similarity in the second violin's restless accompanying figuration. Hovering around the mediant and underpinned by a repeated figure in cello and viola, it precedes the first thematic entrance which recalls the first subject of his ‘Unfinished’ Symphony.

It is the slow second movement, however, which has lent the Quartet its nickname. Moving to C Major, it consists of an extended rhapsodic exploration of a theme from Schubert’s earlier ‘Entr’acte No. 3,’ incidental music for Helmina von Chélzy’s play ‘Rosamunde, Princess of Cyprus.’ It employs the same modified exposition-recapitulation form of his ‘Great’ C Major Symphony, in which an ambiguity of formal definition is created by the introduction of a developmental passage shortly after the return of the primary theme in the recapitulation, while the dactyl-spondee rhythm pervading this movement also reveals the unmistakable influence of Beethoven's ‘Seventh Symphony.’

A profound sense of disquiet pervades the tonally ambiguous ‘Menuetto,’ which often offers some respite from the hectic emotions of its surrounding movements. Another Schubert song reappears, this time his setting of Schiller’s poem of loss and disillusion, ‘Die Gotter Greichenlands’ from November 1819 (a connection only noticed more than a century after the work's composition by Willi Kahl). The opening of this melody recurs in inversion at the beginning of the trio and is later echoed in the opening of the finale. By opening the fourth movement in A major, Schubert hints at a positive and optimistic resolution, but the suggestion of sunshine proves ephemeral and evanescent, with the score rapidly assuming an anxious and neurotic tone, forming a complex finale that is at once languidly retrospective and highly introspective.

The second programme was billed as a “joyous tribute to life and artistic experience,” opening with Sergei Prokofiev’s String Quartet No.1 in B Minor. Having left Russia in May 1918, he toured extensively in the US and Europe, eventually settling in Paris, where he enjoyed a degree of success, although some ultra-modernists criticised elements of his work as both old fashioned and ‘Bolshevist.’

Neither charge can be levelled at his first string quartet, however. Written in 1930 and commissioned by the Elizabeth Sprague Collective Foundation at Washington’s Library of Congress, its structure is strictly neo-classical and shaped by his study of Beethoven’s string quartets. Despite the the drama that infuses the work, its delicacy and restraint are typical of Prokofiev’s approach to neoclassicism. Following premieres with the Rosa Quartet in April 1931 and the Roth Quartet in Moscow in October 1931, it was firmly established as a twentieth-century masterpiece.

In typically eclectic fashion, the NZSQ followed this with Kiwi composer Ross Harris’ String Quartet No.9. It begins in the manner of a resonantly choral and hymn-like fugue, enriched by the musicians’ own humming. Mellifluous ascending figurations emerge from the chorales, growing in complexity while still managing to retain their essentially tender finesse. Written in 2021, it is a cohesive and condensed miniature that lasts less than eight minutes.

Finally, Bedrich Smetana’s Quartet No.1 in E Minor (‘From My Life’) juxtaposes high drama, intense celebration, and unremitting despair in equal proportion. Just as Bartok employed elements of Hungary’s fast-disappearing folk music in his lifelong effort to preserve his country’s national identity, Smetana established a recognisably Czech style of music. And like Bartok, he constantly struggled for acceptance as a composer in Prague, where his music was initially condemned.

Personal pain and joy similarly prompted his compositions. In 1845, his daughter died from tuberculosis and ten years later another succumbed to scarlet fever at the age of four. Smetana wrote his Trio in G Minor in her memory, only to be hit by another blow when his third child died in 1856. Nearly two decades later, Smetana had finally started to flourish both artistically and professionally, when his health began to fail. In 1876, increasingly deaf and frail, he retired to the Czech countryside where he composed ‘From My Life.’

This programmatic work represents different chapters in Smetana’s chequered career, beginning as a predominantly tonal artist. This largely Romantic idyll is interrupted by a jagged motif, a long note and a large leap, symbolising the deafness that would later afflict him. Recalling his youth as a passionate dancer, the second movement is built around a polka, while the third not only recalls his his first wife with a sense of tender rapture, but also alludes to the marital struggles that followed the loss of their three children.

The elegiac, yet unflinching finale is an equivocal summation of his life, tempering the pleasure of celebration with a profound sense of painful suffering. As Smetana himself wrote, it “describes the discovery that I could treat national elements of music and my joy in following this path until it was checked by the catastrophe of the onset off my deafness, the outlook into that sad future, the tiny rays of hope and recovery, but remembering all the praise of my early career, a feeling of painful regret.”

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Howard Davis

Scoop Arts Editor

Educated at Cambridge and UCLA; worked on several major Hollywood feature films and as a Kundalini Yoga instructor in Los Angeles; currently enjoying life in Wellington.

Contact Howard Davis

• Email - howard@scoop.co.nz