NZTrio: fragment
Justine Cormack, violin; Ashley Brown, cello; Sarah Watkins,
piano
Q Theatre Loft, Sunday 9 August
Ernest Chausson, Piano Trio in G Minor, op. 3
Chris Cree Brown, Gallipoli Fragments for Piano Trio, Fixed
Media and Images
Sergei Rachmaninov, Trio Elegiaque No. 1 in G Minor
Review by Alex Taylor
NZTrio are surely one of New Zealand’s busiest and most
innovative chamber ensembles. Tackling a wide range of repertoire and building
collaborations across genre and culture, they are a key part of our musical
ecosystem, and help to keep the live chamber music experience relevant to all
kinds of listeners. Perhaps most important though is their staunch, even
evangelical advocacy for New Zealand composers, at home and abroad. They
devoted their latest CD Lightbox exclusively to kiwi composers, and continue to
commission and programme New Zealand repertoire in all of their concerts.
On Sunday the trio launched their annual season at Q Theatre
Loft. Three concerts – “fragment”, “surge” and “blast” – are themed around
French composers, paired with new commissions from Chris Cree Brown, David
Hamilton and Kenneth Young. Although these three New Zealand composers were all
born within two years of one another, their musical aesthetics are diverse,
from the visceral sonic art of Cree Brown, to Hamilton’s minimalist-inflected
pep and Young’s colourful lyricism, which seems particularly suited to the
French pairing. The titles of the concerts also aptly reflect the dynamism of
the NZTrio themselves – charismatic performers never yet short of energy in
their fourteen-year history.
Opening with Chausson, the trio navigated the sometimes
relentlessly dark, even turgid, harmonic waves of the first movement with tastefulness
and clarity. But it was in the inner movements that the players’ abilities
shone brightest. The second movement looks forward to Ravel and Prokofiev in
playfully percussive piano writing and crystalline string hues: a vehicle
well-suited to the trio’s colouristic talents. Sporting a Morrissey-esque
sculptural hairstyle and battling a nasty flu, Ashley Brown still drew out the
richest of tenors from his instrument. In the lyrical third movement, Justine
Cormack showed nuanced phrasing, and Sarah Watkins produced an almost celesta-like
tone at the impressionistic tail. After these wonderfully aerated interludes,
the finale was something of a let-down; despite the best efforts of the trio,
the language was constrained by a return to earnestness, forced intensity,
fragmentation without lightness.
The Rachmaninov trio that closed the concert did suffer a
little in the shadow of Chris Cree Brown’s boldness, the teenage Romanticism at
times cloying. I was all G-minored out after the Chausson and frankly to follow
a Gallipoli piece it’s quite possible that any sort of music would feel trivial
or contrived. Nevertheless there were
some moments to enjoy here: Watkins found the full weight of the piano with
which to saturate the texture; Rachmaninov reminded us of his skill as a
tunesmith, many of the lines leaving us teasingly hanging. Apart from a couple
of rare intonational blemishes in muted octaves, Brown and Cormack were again
in fine lyrical form.
Chris Cree Brown doesn’t mince words: his work often has a
clear political dimension with a message that’s difficult to ignore. His 1987 Black
and White, a piece for orchestra and tape, written in response to the 1981
Springbok Tour, was punctuated by live shouts of “Fuck Off Boks” and striking
documentary recordings of the tour protests. Not dissimilarly, Gallipoli
Fragments blends historical war photographs and posters of British propaganda with
recorded and synthesised sounds and live instrumental music. Through a
contemporary lens the propaganda posters took on an acerbic wit: “This space is
reserved for a fit man. Will you fill it?” Visceral metallic clangs and buzzing
flies illustrated sonically the banal, dire and pointlessly pathetic Gallipoli
campaign. Against this was the suggestion of universal camaraderie, symbolised
by Attaturk’s words to the fallen ANZACs, “You are now lying in the soil of a
friendly country.”
In the quest for audience appeal, more and more arts
organisations are turning to collaboration and cross-over. For me a key problem
of Sunday’s concert experience was the literalism of that cross-over. From
the chef’s-special-esque programme notes that promised “hillsides of
sunflowers, a heady mix of coffee, cigarettes and perfume” in Chausson’s piano
trio, to the bubbling water and gunshot battle sounds of Cree Brown’s Gallipoli
Fragments, we were spoonfed the connections between sound and image, told what
to think and feel before we thought or felt it. Cree Brown’s work was described
as “powerful, nostalgic, tragic, open-hearted, raw” before we’d heard the first
sound of the piece. The attempt to “cross-over” the microtonally inflected Turkish
melodies to the fixed pitch of the piano trio was only partially successful,
and the re-enacted last words of a soldier felt oddly impersonal.
For all the literalism though, there was a transcendental
moment half-way through: Cree Brown’s characteristic Aeolian harp sonorities
faded seamlessly into a piano rendition of the Christian hymn Abide With Me,
over which was layered the Islamic Call to Prayer, and later the strings
entered with the Russian National Anthem of the time inflecting the underlying
harmony of the piano hymn. Continuing as the hymn and anthem ended together, the
Call to Prayer blended back into the initial Aeolian Harp sonority. The
delicate superposition of these three emotionally charged layers was executed
masterfully; what could easily have become cacophonous at one extreme or
saccharine at the other instead sat yearning and twisting on the heart-strings.
This is the sort of moment one goes to concerts to experience – a fleeting but
indelible point of transcendental beauty and clarity – and everything
immediately before and after in a sense pales into insignificance.
