NZSQ Inaugurates Wellington Chamber Music’s New Season

Monday, 28 April 2025, 7:53 am
Opinion: Howard Davis

“The modern world seems to have no notion of preserving different things side by side, of allowing its proper and proportionate place to each, of saving the whole varied heritage of culture. It has no notion except that of simplifying something by destroying nearly everything.” - G.K. Chesterton, AlI I Survey.

The freshly reconstituted New Zealand String Quartet inaugurated Wellington Chamber Music’s 2025 season at St Andrew’s On The Terrace with an intriguing programme that included rigorous renditions of John Psathas’ KARTSIGAR, Dmitri Shostakovich’s String Quartet No.1 in C major, and Edvard Grieg’s String Quartet in G minor.

Established in 1987, the New Zealand String Quartet is Aotearoa’s longest-serving professional string quartet and internationally renowned for its insightful interpretations and dynamic style. It has played a lead role in music education at Victoria University’s School of Music since 1991, hosts the annual Adam Summer School for Chamber Music in Nelson, and mentors young musicians from across the motu. A proud cultural ambassador, it has not only commissioned over a hundred and fifty original works by Kiwis, but also actively championed Maori music.

Last year, married couple Helene Pohl and Rolf Gjelsten (who had performed with the NZSQ for thirty years) were accused of “serious and sensitive issues” apparently involving nepotism and conflicts of interest in their teaching roles. This led to their abrupt resignations from both the University and the NZSQ and the removal of their profiles and images from the their website, constituting an enormous loss to Wellington’s music community as they are both supremely gifted musicians and widely regarded as dedicated and inspiring teachers.

The NZSQ’s two remaining members, Peter Clark and Gillian Ansell, subsequently recruited guest artists Anna van der Zee and Callum Hall. Following a period of extensive study and overseas performances with leading international string quartets, van der Zee is now a First Violin for the NZSO, while Hall has toured New Zealand with some of the country’s leading orchestras. Although Pohl and Gjelsten will be sorely missed, the new members acquitted themselves admirably under these unfortunate circumstances, retaining not only the Quartet’s customarily high degree of bravura versatility, but also its adventurous programming.

The intriguing sequencing of these three ‘difficult’ pieces in reverse chronological order traced the organic roots of Psathas’ post-modernism backwards, through Shostakovich’s uncompromising modernism to Grieg’s lyrical Nordic Romanticism, which heralded the future direction of much twentieth-century classical music. Despite often disparaging Grieg’s abilities as a composer and pianist, the falling introductory motif inspired Claude Debussy’s subsequent experiments in diverse sonorities - particularly (according to English musicologist Gerald Abraham) his own String Quartet, which was also comnposed in G minor.

The son of Greek immigrant parents, Psathas grew up in Taumaruni and attended Napier Boys' High School, leaving early to study composition and piano at Victoria University. He supported himself as a student partly by playing up to nine gigs a week in a jazz trio. His musical style combines elements of jazz, classical, Eastern European and Middle Eastern, avant-garde, rock, and electronica. In 2018 he retired from his university tenure to become a full-time composer and was granted the position of Emeritus Professor at the New Zealand School of Music. Two years later, he was appointed Composer-in-Residence with Orchestra Wellington.

A retrospective concert of his chamber music was part of the 2000 New Zealand International Festival of the Arts, culminating with the premiere of a specially commissioned Piano Quintet. In his programme notes to that concert, Psathas described his process of composing as follows -

"When I write music, it's not a sense of inventing I experience, as much as it is a sense of finding something that exists at the remote periphery of what I know. It is like seeing things - that aren't really there - in the corner of one's eye, but not spinning around to view them, because then they would simply cease to be. It is a case of being aware of a thing in one's peripheral vision and, while staring straight ahead, trying to decipher, without looking at it, the true nature of what it is. What one is finding is exactly the right thing for any given moment in a musical work."

KARTSIGAR was written in 2004 and consists of two movements (Unbridled, Manos Breathes the Voice of Life into Kartsigar and Vagelis Varies the Sazi Riff at the Paradiso), both of which are infused with a sonorously haunting and luminescent quality that evokes the Eastern Orthodox heritage of Byzantine music, whose earliest composers have been remembered by name since the fifth century.

In his programme notes to KARTSIGAR, Psathas commented -

“Both movements of this work began as transcriptions of recorded performances by two of Greece’s living master-musicians, clarino player Manos Achalinotopoulos and percussionist Vagelis Karypis. The transcriptions are based on two separate recordings of a traditional taximi entitled Kartsigar. Taximia form part of an oral tradition where improvisation played an important role. The taximi Kartsigar comprises two elements: an ostinato and the improvised melody. The melody forms the basis of the first movement of the quartet, and the ostinato forms the basis of the second.”

“The first movement grows from my transcription of Manos (whose surname translates to “he who cannot be bridled”) performing his own astonishing realisation of Kartsigar on the CD Klarino … The traditional ostinato has been removed from this movement and replaced by a pedal note (F#), which creates a very different set of tensions and resolutions for the improvised melody. The ostinato in Kartsigar is heard unaccompanied in the first two measures of the second movement, and then continues throughout. Through transcription of his live performance, I discovered that Vagelis had produced some eighty separate variations of the ostinato almost without repetition. This sequence of variations became the basis for the second movement of the quartet.”

Composed in six weeks after the second birthday of his daughter during the summer of 1938, Shostakovich’s String Quartet No.1 in C major lasts less than fifteen minutes and looks back to the comfort and balanced elegance of the eighteenth century for its inspiration. Shostakovich said he had "visualised childhood scenes, somewhat naïve and bright moods associated with spring … The whole year after completing Symphony No. 5 I did nothing. I merely wrote the Quartet, consisting of four small sections. No special idea or emotions had stimulated me to write it, and I thought the effort would fail. I wrote the first page as a kind of exercise in the quartet form, and I never thought I would complete it.”

As Julian Barnes described in his masterful meditation on the relationship between art and political power The Noise of Time, the previous years were marked by Stalin’s campaign against artistic ‘formalism’ in general and repeated denunciations of Shostakovich in Pravda in particular, which caused his monthly earnings from both commissions and performances of his music to decline markedly. 1936 marked the beginning of the Great Terror, in which many of his friends and relatives were either imprisoned or killed. Convinced he was about to be arrested, Shostakovich managed to secure an appointment with the Chairman of the State Committee on Culture, who reported back to Stalin that he had instructed the composer to "reject formalist errors and in his art attain something that could be understood by the broad masses.”

Given this dangerously repressive context, it’s hardly surprising that Shostakovich confined himself to relatively accessible compositions immediately afterwards. His String Quartet No.1 in C major begins softly with almost childlike innocence, its language uncharacteristically tonal and often serene. The shocking dissonances and tense harmonic undulations of his symphonies are largely absent, providing a sense of emotional respite after the tumult of his more complex compositions.

The first movement is in sonata-allegro form in C major, starting with an exposition of flowing chords under an opening theme, which then moves to a contrasting second theme. After a brief development section and recapitulation, the movement comes to a close. The slow second movement, in A minor, consists of eight variations on a folk-like melody first played on solo viola and ends with a delicious pizzicato A minor chord. The third movement is set in the remote key of C minor, opening with a rapid theme in 3/4 time, before moving on to the trio in F major which is slightly more relaxed in tempo. The scherzo is then repeated again, with the coda briefly recalling the trio theme, while the final movement returns to the home key of C major.

Edvard Grieg began composing his infrequently performed String Quartet in G minor in 1877, writing to a friend that it was not designed to “peddle occasional flashes of brilliance,” but instead “aims towards breadth, soaring flight, and above all resonance for the instruments for which it is written.”

Van der Zee’s playing on Greg Squires’ marvellous Milano 1760 Landolfi violin possessed a lush and verdurous quality that was certainly solemn in parts, but also joyous in its conclusion. All four performers clearly revelled in the opportunity to display their prowess with some simultaneous fortissimo double-stopping in multiple instruments that produced a richness of texture that suggested a far larger ensemble and had the audience wanting to hear much more.

In conclusion, Anthony Grigg’s insightful programme notes are worth quoting -

“The density of sound in this quartet was unusual for its time … [Grieg] creates different timbres by use of a more subtle counterpoint, seamless voice-leading across all four instruments, and reference to folk and dance music. In combination, these create a work of considerable diversity and texture. Liszt, a friend and supporter of Grieg, admired this work and welcomed its addition to the repertoire, where it remains as one of the most original and influential quartets of the late nineteenth century.”

“The quartet uses the melody of Grieg’s own Ibsen-inspired song Spillemaend (‘Minstrel’) as the principal motif throughout all four movements. Its opening descending intervals … serve to bind together the whole work and provide it with thematic and melodic unity. [It] is first heard in the slow introduction to the first movement Un poco andante - Allegro molto ed agitato, then interrupts the tranquil waltz rhythm of the Romanze: Andantino with an agitated second section and reappears as the opening theme in the Intermezzo: Allegro molto marcato before its quieter central section - Più vivo e scherzando. The last movement begins with a slow introduction in which the motif returns before the music launches into a Finale: Lento - Presto al saltarello, with its folk-like melody and leaping dance rhythms based on a fast triple meter and ending optimistically in G major.”

Wellington Chamber Music’s 2025 season continues on Sunday 25 May with the Amici Ensemble piano quartet performing Jean Françaix’ String Trio in C major, Op.2, Gustave Fauré’s Piano Quartet No.2 in G minor, Op.45, Johannes Brahms’ Piano Quartet No.3 in C minor Op.60.

For more concert details, see www.sundayconcerts.org.nz.

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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