NZTRIO
Dunedin Public Art Gallery
Thursday, October 18
Chamber music finds an appropriate setting surrounded by New Zealand landscapes hanging in the Dunedin Public Art Gallery. This venue perhaps best replicates the atmosphere for which this music was written; where both eye and ear are simultaneously enriched and miraculously neither competes for attention.
The gallery has warm acoustics which accentuated the NZTrio's muscular precision and their more delicately woven magic. A select and happily accommodated audience was danced through a spectrum of soundscapes from the late 19th century to the present day.
The programme opened with Turina's heart-warming, busy, grand and exultant Piano Trio No 2. Australian Gordon Kerry took his inspiration for Im Winde from Holderlin's poem. While one wonders how else to portray cold and ice, shuddering violin tremulos are almost a cliched motif. But Kerry's sounds successfully conjured up whistling and swirling winds and the savage beauty of extreme cold.
Burlesques Mechaniques, commissioned by the NZTrio from the youngest recipient of the 2012 Sounz contemporary composer award, Alex Taylor, is a challenging work to perform but very easy to listen to. Successfully performed, its 10 succinct tableaux contain thrown rhythms which wittily de-centre, destablise and occasionally hurl ingeniously snatched signatures at the ear. They travel from the whimsical to the dark, finishing with a depiction of mechanised and hence dehumanised man as visually presented by the Vorticists.
Dvorak smoothed out any residual rough edges. The laments in each movement of the Trio No 4 are distinctive and wholeheartedly beautiful, enough to remind one that someone else very wisely said that trying to describe music was like trying to dance to architecture.
And on that note I can only add that the NZTrio bring their own brand of intelligent vitality to a superb new setting. Both provided just the right tonic for whatever might ail one.
- Marian Poole.
