• Leap of faith brought violinist back to musical roots
However, Tessa Petersen and Heleen du Plessis say they are able to work out their differences and together come up with something better than their individual viewpoints.
Executant lecturers in the University of Otago music department, Petersen (violin) and du Plessis (cello) will play the concerto in the Southern Sinfonia's concert on Saturday.
In the concerto, the violin and cello often play as one, sharing the same melody line and handing it back and forth between each other.
"Often I'll start a melodic line and the last note Heleen plays, that pitch is the first note I play. I pick up her last note and take it to the top then come down and hand it to Heleen and sometimes it's fast-moving," Petersen says.
She thinks it important that they are friends, as well as colleagues.
"It's this friendship thread that goes through and stands above all other things, so whatever you disagree about, the fundamental thing stays the same, that we are friends. We may differ about this and that but the friendship remains the same," she says.
Friendship was also important in the origins of this concerto. Brahms was asked by Robert Hausmann, cellist in the Joachim quartet to write a concerto, but he decided to write it for both violin and cello, as a peace offering to his old friend, violinist Joseph Joachim, leader of the quartet.
They had fallen out a few years earlier when Brahms sided with Joachim's wife over their divorce.
"They hadn't really spoken for four years, so Brahms wrote to Joachim and asked him if he would consider playing this concerto he had written. It was a big deal and renewed their friendship," she says.
This is not the first time Petersen and du Plessis have played a double concerto. They performed one by Anthony Ritchie in Hawkes Bay last year, and now have their sights set on others.
"This is just the beginning - it's going to be a theme!" du Plessis says. Tessa Petersen says her performance will be dedicated to her niece Chloe Anson (16), who died suddenly last weekend.
See them
Tessa Petersen and Heleen du Plessis will play Brahms' Concerto for Violin and Cello with the Southern Sinfonia, conducted by Simon Over, this Saturday, April 2 at 8pm, in the Dunedin Town Hall. The orchestra will also perform Tippet's Little Music and Vaughan Williams' Symphony No 5.
