Join our email list
“The whole programme was superbly performed, and extremely well received”~ John Button ~ read full review
“Trio rewarded by Chamber Music New Zealand with a ten centre tour”~ Samuel Holloway ~ read full review
“NZTrio asset to the musical life of NZ”~ Andrew Buchanan-Smart ~ read full review
“Three sophisticated musicians displayed at Auckland Museum”~ John Daly-Peoples ~ read full review
“They play as though virtuosity is just an incidental”~ Paul Serotsky ~ read full review
“The NZTrio are a gift to New Zealand composers.”~ John Psathas, New Zealand composer ~ read full review
22 April 2010
The NZTrio shows its true colours with the classy playing we have come to expect.
Justine Cormack, Ashley Brown and Sarah Watkins have never shirked from presenting the here-and-now on the concert stage, whether individually or as members of NZTrio, and the group’s Tuesday concert for Chamber Music New Zealand was no exception.
Jennifer Higdon’s 2003 Piano Trio was a timely opener, with the American composer just having received a Pulitzer Prize. Her colour-inspired score brought forth the alert, classy ensemble playing we have come to expect from the three musicians.
Justine Cormack’s violin tone might have registered a little thinly in the upper register, even for a piece titled Pale Yellow but the ensuing Fiery Red was as intense and vibrant as one could wish for.
Higdon had set the tone for a lightish programme and, before the interval, a 1926 Piano Trio by Joaquin Turina saw the musicians finding obvious delight in its well-groomed spanishry.
Many must have been curious to hear a commission from New Zealand jazz pianist Judy Bailey who has been working in Sydney for half a century now.
Her So Many Rivers flowed best in its outer sections, laying out a contemplative mood over luminous piano harmonies. We had been promised a more “bubbly” central section and, when it came, it was slightly let down by awkward writing.
The other new piece, Stuart Greenbaum’s The Year Without a Summer, benefited from the ongoing transtasman Composer Exchange Programme, which has allowed close contact between performers and composer. The first part of the work had the NZTrio showing its mettle in a driving, rhythmic style, while the more reflective music that followed was transparently simple in its conception and delicately rendered by the musicians.
The real substance of the evening came with Schumann’s F major Trio, one of his finest scores. The musicians rode the swerving surges of its opening movement with exhilarating abandon. In the following Mit innigem Ausdruck, Cormack and Brown’s dialogue of enchantment, floating over Watkins’ sonorous piano, evoked the ultimate Schumann dreamworld.
