Review: Karlheinz Company at Auckland University Music Theatre

Composer Samuel Holloway. Photo / Greg Bowker

There was a buzz of anticipation before Karlheinz Company's Sunday concert, with two new commissions coming up and neither allowing for even a smack of compromise in their bars, perhaps to the point of asceticism.

Samuel Holloway's Impossible Songs continued the intense sonic explorations of his earlier Domestic Architecture.

After three subtly wending and winding movements, the string quartet was joined by soprano Tania Priebs whose big moment came in the arching lines of the fourth song. Yet Holloway's instructions seemed to deny the passion implicit in the music, ending the cycle with a jab of bowed static from viola.

A provocative work from a particularly challenging young composer.

Alison Grant's Laying In/Laying Out had busier textures, etched with the finest musical draughtsmanship, but the rhythmic complexities needed more relaxation from the seven players.

John Elmsly conducted, stressing key gestural moments that punctuate the score.

Leonie Holmes' Fragment for String Quartet was comparatively traditional, with even a nod or two to Bartok, but its wisps and spirallings of sound had a wonderful airiness, and, at one point, Holmes surprised us with a D major chord.

Soren Nils Eichberg's Four Pieces received the most satisfying ensemble playing of the afternoon from bassoonist Ben Hoadley and pianist Flora Lee.

These miniatures were models of the composerly craft, spiky in spirit, yet not afraid to contemplate the suggestion of a wistful ballad.

Finally, two works from the 70s recalled those halcyon days when the avant-garde was a force to be reckoned with.

James Tenney's Having Never Written a Note for Percussion had Holloway beating a gong from silence to deafening din and back again. It was good to experience it in the flesh, rather than from the pages of a textbook.

After the interval, Boris Tishchenko's virtuoso Fifth Piano Sonata received a dazzling New Zealand premiere from Deng Liang.

Working through a profusion of detail, Liang zoomed from chordal ricochet and cascades of birdsong through to a cheesy whirl of an intermezzo which suggested that American minimalism did manage to tear through the Iron Curtain back in 1974. Bravo.