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8 August 2011
Truly magical and memorable music
It has been a very good year for chamber music, and attendances to concerts have been gratifyingly large. With the Wellington Town Hall, artfully reduced in size with drapes, a fine acoustic space, we have enjoyed some superb playing, but I wonder if we have heard anything as magical as this concert.
We knew that John Chen was not only a wonderful concert pianist, but a superb chamber musician as well, so it was the quality of his two string colleagues that was the surprise. Both Canadian violinist Luanne Homzy and American cellist Peter Myers are marvellous players. Both are technically dazzling, but it is that purity of sound that both produce that resonates in the memory.
It is Chen who leads from the keyboard, and it is his inspiration that makes theperformances of both the Ravel Piano Trio and Schubert’s E flat Trio (D929) completely special.
This is, of course, natural in the development of the piano trio – early trios were piano works with reinforcement and colouring from the strings.
Schubert followed on from Beethoven in giving a greater democracy to all three players, and the later Ravel completes the process, but the pianist remains the leader and, without a masterly player, these works cannot get off the ground.
Here, with Chen offering a masterclass, each work soared into the ether, offering moment after moment of magic.
Alwyn Westbrooke is a talented young musician who first came to attention at the 2000 Schools Chamber Music Contest for his composition. He is also a fine violinist and has played in Dresden’s second orchestra – the Philharmonic.
His “?” or Why Gryphons Shouldn’t Dance might have a pretentious title, but it is a gritty, competent piece, apparently taking its material from Latin American dance rhythms. I will take his word for this, but it, for all its promise, could not compete with the music-making that followed.