KEY POINTS:
Fantastical birds are all over the artwork of the NZ Trio's second album, while the title, brighttidemovingbetween, with its four words modishly run together, hints at the journey awaiting us.
The exhilarating second and third of Bright Sheng's Four Movements could well provide the group with encore fodder in perpetuity.
The players razzle and dazzle us, especially in the third with its dragonish snarls and snaps, caught with the same presence and sheer wallop that the album's engineer Steve Garden meted out to John Psathas' music on earlier CDs.
Sheng's outer movements, with their atmospheric sighs and slides, evoke more exotic mysteries.
Moving to Japan, time passes gently but irrevocably in Toru Takemitsu's Between Tides, through the composer's usual blend of East and West, anchored around Sarah Watkins' contemplative piano.
When the NZ Trio gave us Ross Edwards' Piano Trio in concert two years ago, I felt it was so audience-friendly that the score seemed to give us all a collective embrace.
It seems more so on disc.
The Australian composer's many shifts and turns create a restless, questing music in which even the smallest fragment is vividly sketched, from insect world twitchings to eyebrow-raising nods to Chopin and Sondheim.
The musicians find just the right deliberate pacing for Edwards' dance finale - the Eggner Trio rushed it when they played it in Sydney a few years ago. Once again, the clarity of the recording makes for crisp musical detail. Landscape and soundscape merge in Gillian Whitehead's Piano Trio. If Takemitsu charts the pulse of the tidal flow, then Whitehead zooms in on water patternings; in stream, waterfall and lake.
Rattle's evocative recording realises the piece's inner beauties. Pizzicato notes have a liquid gleam to them, the piano lulls in its ripplings. In the final few minutes of the first movement, the musicians effortlessly travel from impressionistic chords through touches of rhetoric and birdsong to a fluttering chordal farewell.
The NZ Trio's 2005 album Spark showed us how well New Zealand composers could write for this medium; now, with brighttidemovingbetween, their voices have been placed in a world and Pacific context.
* NZ Trio, Brighttidemovingbetween (Rattle RAT 0017, through Ode Records)
