What: St Lawrence String Quartet.
Where: Auckland Town Hall.
When: tonight at 8pm
Christopher Costanza is the soul of affability, considering it is almost midnight in Canada when I call him. The St Lawrence String Quartet's cello man has just come in from a gruelling session recording John Adams' new String Quartet - the same work the group is playing in its Auckland concert tonight.
The score received its premiere earlier this year in New York and the SLSQ have been taking it around the world - through the States, Canada, Europe and now New Zealand.
Critical reception has been ecstatic, with one review lauding its "tremendous fervency" and "lines that rise and shimmer like heat off a highway", toasting the players for their "fierce, go-for-broke reading".
Adams is one of the high-profilers of contemporary music. Over the past few years we have had a concert performance of his 1991 opera The Death of Klinghoffer, while Harmonielehre and The Chairman Dances have turned up in recent Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra programmes.
"John is known for writing these large-scale works for great numbers of people," Costanza explains. "But the new quartet has been really exciting for him, as he's been able to work with a more compact ensemble. He's like a kid in a candy shop."
Adams has been a positive presence at the recording sessions. "He focuses on detail. He talks to us about bow-strokes and slur patterns; he's fascinated with the range of sounds that can be created.
"He realises the piece can come across as almost 'over-the-top intense', and he looks for a way to take some of the calmer material and make it more calm."
The cellist describes Adams as one of the first of the minimalists, writing music "with a lot of rhythmic drive and complexity built into it".
As it happens, when the composer first heard the St Lawrence String Quartet, it was the Canadians' sharp rhythmic playing that caught his attention. And, from that has come a special partnership.
"It's just a matter of finding enough time to spend with a composer and get that living quality of a piece to stay," Costanza explains. "I suspect a lot of the great works in history have been written that way."
Tonight's concert is not all newer-than-new; it also includes Haydn's F major Quartet Opus 77 No 2, one of his last works in the genre.
Describing some of Haydn's sly musical u-turns, the ebullient cellist's enthusiasm trails off into "oh my goodness" before observing that "the way Haydn handles his key relationships knocks you over; they're quite something".
Prepare to be swept away rather than knocked over in the second half of tonight's concert, when the New Zealand String Quartet joins the Canadian ensemble for one of the wittiest and most vivacious works in the chamber music canon; Mendelssohn's Octet.
For Costanza, this is a piece that brings back childhood memories of driving in his father's car listening to a cassette recording by the Cleveland and Tokyo Quartets.
"Mendelssohn was just 16 when he wrote it and it does have that youthful appeal," he points out. "It's in-your-face in a good way, in a big smiling kind of way. Like somebody looking at you with a huge grin and saying, 'Hey, here I am!"'
It's the perfect finale to round off a bumper season for Chamber Music New Zealand.
