NZTrio: Justine Cormack, violin; Ashley Brown, cello; Sarah Watkins, piano
Sunday 14 September, Q Theatre Loft
Review by Alex Taylor
NZTrio describes itself as “versatile and genre-busting.”
Certainly its commitment to both the traditional classical canon of trio
repertoire and to new commissions by New Zealand composers enables striking
juxtaposition and variety. However one avenue not so much explored has been the
Avant Garde of the 20th and 21st centuries, from which
New Zealand composers draw much of their inspiration. This is partly due no
doubt to the relative neglect of the traditional violin-cello-piano trio during
this period. Many of the pioneering composers passed over the piano trio in
favour of other combinations: Schoenberg and Webern favoured the more homogeneous and fragile string trio, while Ligeti took the Brahms horn trio as
his model for something quite different.
What was special about Sunday’s concert was that it included
not only a new NZTrio commission in the form of John Elmsly’s Ritual Triptych, but also a meaty nod to
the European Avant Garde with Salvatore Sciarrino’s Piano Trio no. 2. The prosaic title belies the ingenuity of
Sciarrino’s composition – this might be the most ambitious work NZTrio have
attempted to date. A slippery tangle of string harmonics is coerced into action
by high-tensile piano entries, the fragile texture eventually shredded by the
piano’s pinball-machine glissandi. There’s a real sense of alchemy, of
elemental conflict and synthesis, as the players navigate bursts of activity
and lulls of tentative pulsation. Sarah Watkins attacked the keyboard with mercurial
ferocity, and Justine Cormack’s and Ashley Brown’s stratospheric duets were
highly nuanced. However at times I felt the group’s natural tendency towards
clipped articulation and playfulness went against the character of the more
spectral episodes, and the clarity of cello and violin was not always balanced.
Nevertheless this was a thrilling performance, and I look forward to more
adventures in modernism from the trio.
Following a sustained bout of applause from an enthusiastic
full house, Ashley Brown began rubbing his bow across the cello strings,
creating an abrasive sort of white noise. He explained that he was recharging
his bow, collecting the rosin deposited in Sciarrino’s more aggressive bouts of
scraping and shuffling. Brown went on to say that “in order to make some nice
noises [i.e. those about to come in the Mendelssohn trio] we have to make some
ugly ones.” Although this could be
viewed as extraneous to the performance itself, I thought it was fascinating both
as sound, and as a window into the mindset of the performer. What I
extrapolated from his comment, rightly or wrongly, was that he believes a
performance is made up of nice sounds; “ugly” sounds have no place in
performance. For the performer, performance is a struggle for perfection.
How a listener
experiences performance is rather different: a mixture of engagement and
inattention, conflicting sources of information, the transformation of memory.
There are many reasons that we enjoy a performance. For me it is often a tiny
moment or interaction; it might even be something transitional or peripheral,
or the overwhelming excess of a sound world. For every listener it is
different. So it bothers me a little when a performance experience gets
packaged and crafted into a singular sound bite, ostensibly to make it easier
to digest for the layperson. NZTrio’s “listening notes” were such a packaging,
forcing pictorial simplifications onto the music before it even had a chance to
express itself. I don’t doubt that these notes were conceived with the best of
intentions, as a window into specific soundworlds, but these were windows that had
been painted over with childish landscapes. Some of them invoked quite
beautiful metaphors – in particular the description of the Sciarrino as “ancient
whale song” and “cascading crystal meteors” – but no matter how striking the
image, they still remove the listener’s imagination from the equation.
While Sciarrino was somewhat uncharted territory for the
group, Mendelssohn’s C minor trio is well ingrained in the canon, hailed as a
masterwork by Watkins. The music is demanding, but all three players displayed
an elegant ease with the material. They clearly enjoyed the bustling toccata of
the scherzo and the grand scope of the finale, seamlessly blending together the
diverse characters of Mendelssohn: the daintily balletic and the gleamingly
pastoral. This is where the trio are at their best – inhabiting well defined
characters, where they can show off their impressively tight ensemble playing
and shiny virtuosity.
At the other end of the programme was the relatively
unfamiliar Beethoven trio (op. 1 no. 2) – altogether more transparent and
exposed than the Mendelssohn. The ungainly writing of the first movement was
not always successfully navigated, but after the rather torpid second movement,
the work seemed to take on new life in the scherzo with a dose of swing and the
trio’s characteristic lightness of touch.
The most arresting moment of the concert was the opening of
John Elmsly’s Ritual Triptych, a
jagged, disorientating gesture coloured by the rapid stroking of piano strings.
This explosion left in its wake a mesmerising, Feldmanesque stasis that
gradually formed into haloed, pentatonic gongs. Every so often the meditative
atmosphere was broken by the startling intrusion of the opening gesture. There
was a palpable sense of ritual, although for me this was an alien ritual I was
observing from outside, transfixed and perplexed.
Such a jolt was that initial gesture that the central
movement Con Fuoco felt almost pale
by comparison. Intensity was sacrificed for groove, phrasing for verticality, and
the aggressively shifting harmony was treated too monochromatically. I found
myself longing for the stretched-out phrases of the first movement, the
soft-hued echoes of South East Asia. We were duly rewarded in the final stretch
of the work as the music returned to subtle inflection and wandering
introspection.
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