KEY POINTS:
Struggling up through a gale on Wellesley St, one wondered whether the New Zealand String Quartet had brought a taste of the capital's windy weather with them for their AK07 twilight concert.
Gao Ping's programme Bright Light and Cloud Shadows suffered, competing with the sounds of distressed guttering. A pity, as the work depended very much on its cool, unruffled atmospherics.
The programme note offered generic words on acculturation and world music, but seamless craftsmanship makes it own point. One was caught by the ongoing dialogue between upper and lower strings, including a moment where Vivaldi's birds seemed to be tuning up to a distinctly non-Western scale; elsewhere, glassy, transparent textures evoked landscapes from old Chinese watercolours.
Ross Harris' Third String Quartet announced itself with a gemutlich waltz that could have wheezed out from any barrel-organ on any German strasse; but it just happened to be the last music that Hitler heard in his bunker.
Using a battery of techniques, including the gruff, malcontent splutter of hollow pizzicato, Harris tore the tune apart. Hesitations and insecurities were written-in all along the journey, despite assertive gestures from Helene Pohl's violin and, at another point, an imperturbable tolling note from Rolf Gjelsten's cello.
The NZSQ showed their emotional ownership of this score, thrilling us when a well-gauged crescendo ascended to an ethereal chord which turned out to be the proverbial calm before the expressionist storm of its closing pages.
Schumann's three quartets reveal so much of his inner soul. Not only were they written in the afterglow of his marriage, it was here that he announced to the world that his composing talents were not limited to his own instrument.
The Second is the least familiar, crammed full of testy counterpoint and deceptive rhythm play. The NZSQ caught its mood and spirit if not always the details; intonation was certainly a concern in the unrelenting passage work of the Finale.
Despite the acoustics dampening the spring of those elusive syncopations in the Andante, there was much to admire in the players' warm, generous sound and acute characterisation of each of Schumann's variations.
