Concert Review: NZTrio, Auckland Museum

NZ Trio: Pianist Sarah Watkins, violinist Justine Cormack and cellist Ashley Brown. Photo / Supplied

The final concert of NZTrio's 2010 Museum series made a number of significant connections.

A Schumann Trio completed the group's ongoing centenary tribute to the composer and the Archduke Trio was included as Beethoven wrote this score in 1810, 200 years ago.

Most importantly, a commission from Gareth Farr and Richard Nunns reminded us that this group has always been among the most loyal supporters of music written on these shores.

Dating Schumann's G minor Trio from the time of his "descent into syphilitic mania", as the concert's programme notes had it, seemed slightly tabloid to me, but it certainly is an eccentric and volatile work. And perhaps it was the composer's exceedingly awkward violin lines that occasioned some patches of inelegant playing from Justine Cormack.

Yet it was difficult not to be swept away on the billowing phrases of Schumann's first movement, with its typically cautionary directive - "agitated, but not too fast".

There was the tingle of crunching dissonance in its development section along with some almost jazzy pizzicato play.

At the other end of the programme, Beethoven's Archduke Trio did not fare so well. There were some gorgeously finessed pianissimi, but sometimes strings seemed over-reticent.

The Scherzo had drive and confidence, with Ashley Brown expertly guiding us into the chromatic recesses of its Trio. Sarah Watkins set a tone of unassuming gravitas for the Andante cantabile, a mood threatened at one point by an extremely insecure dolce passage from Cormack.

Gareth Farr and Richard Nunns' Nga Kete e Toru, premiered at the Bay of Islands Arts Festival this year, received its first Auckland airing.

Presiding over a table of his eminently sculptural pumotomoto flutes, Nunns' mystical sonorities outlined a parallel yet complementary universe to Farr's hyper-energetic toccatas. In more reflective moments, breathy shakuhachi-like tone blended with tremolo cello and eerie violin harmonics to spellbinding effect.

This tribute to the all-important passing on of knowledge ended with a hushed postlude in which Nunns turned his back on us and played his pumotomoto into the piano. The resonant poetry that resulted was the high point of the evening.