Review: 175 East at Herald Theatre

James Gardner, founder of 175 East, is quitting after 12 years. Photo / Greg Bowker

The distinguished Elliott Carter receives few performances in this part of the world and, while we wait for one of the American's orchestral works to turn up in our concert halls, 175 East opened its Sunday concert with his 2001 Hiyoki for two clarinets.

Gretchen La Roche and Andrew Uren fashioned a graceful weave, in scurrying toccata at times and elsewhere exploring the beat of blurred dissonance.

The rest of the concert focused on cutting-edge New Zealand music. Dylan Lardelli's to give had all seven musicians choreographed in sound by the masterly conducting of Hamish McKeich, who drew an intriguing sonic world from a series of massive, grating sighs.

Alex Wolken's the body linguistic may seem a complex, spidery affair on paper, but in performance the four players made it all lucid. Did "plan and place collide", as Wolken's programme note suggested they would? Perhaps, yet the miracle was that, for all the fluttering and swooping, one never felt the lack of a structural anchor.

Chris Watson's about nothing ... really was, as his pieces are, replete with incident, four players charting ingenious textures on either side of an searching cadenza for Lardelli's brilliant guitar.

The three titles of Alexandra Hay's Arcs - "light", "lunacies" and "terra firma" - may seem tenuous and impressionistic. Yet this Wellington composer has a gift for making the abstract tangible, from the sense of upward momentum in the flickering first piece to the unbridled Ligeti-ish whirl of the third.

The slow-burn beauties of Samuel Holloway's Sillage closed the concert, the ensemble teasing out subtly colouristic textures over Lardelli's bowed guitar.

Special tribute is due to guitarist Nigel Gavin, who launched the evening with a line of effortless improv in which liquid notes floated around the Herald Theatre and both hands duetted on the fretboard - all this as well as a sly passing reference to The Shadow of Your Smile.

Afterwards, 175 East's founding director, James Gardner, announced he was stepping down after 12 years. Let us hope his successor is found soon.