KEY POINTS:
How pleasant it is to welcome Wilma Smith back on to our concert stages, especially when she brings colleagues such as Ian Munro, David Berlin and Brett Dean in a finely balanced programme of piano quartets.
Opening their Monday night concert with Mozart's G minor work of K 478 was an excellent decision. The piece received the emotional engagement the composer's works in this key demand, yet the players pursued its often unpredictable turns with wit and brio.
Ian Munro's piano, which had provided much of the brilliance for the opening Allegro, announced the Andante with a certain innocence, although the strings soon underscored its essential seriousness.
The final Rondo may have also had its serious moments but proved the perfect vehicle for the group's rippling ensemble.
Aaron Copland's 1950 Piano Quartet is not one of the composer's better-known scores. Unusually, it follows Schoenberg's 12-tone lead, although dissonance is carefully manipulated so that tonality is rarely in doubt, especially in the piano.
If the composer was later to comment that it was like looking at a picture from a different point of view, then the Australian musicians made clear that, at times, we were not too far from the clear, fresh musical terrain of Appalachian Spring.
The first movement started with the coolest of fugues; a little severe in tone, it was a showcase of individual lines, with finely nuanced dynamics.
After the rhythmic surge of the Allegro giusto, with its chiming colours and occasional murmur of harsh intonation here and there, the musicians took us to interval with a breathtaking account of Copland's ethereal finale.
If Brahms' Second Piano Quartet is the composer's longest chamber work, it did not seem so on this occasion.
The four musicians fearlessly took on a demanding score, utterly restless in its swerving moods and textures, particularly in the Allegro non troppo. The Poco Adagio lulled with its constant cross-rhythms, while strings, sans piano, created some luscious harmonies.
The Scherzo, running the gamut from folk-dance to furioso, was exciting stuff and the energy did not dampen for the Finale which ended the concert with lashings of Hungarian fire.
