KEY POINTS:
Justine Cormack, Ashley Brown and Sarah Watkins can be proud of the following they have built up during their five years together as the NZ Trio, winding up their Fire & Water tour last Wednesday to an enthusiastic and full house.
Gareth Farr's Ahi was well placed at the top of the programme. Farr's artless, pretty opening theme seems catchier with every new hearing; its eventual reappearance brings with it the assurance of meeting an old friend.
Ultro Citroque by Hiroyuki Yamamoto had an air of playful deconstruction about it. The strings let loose a menagerie of bizarre sounds against Watkins' spiky piano, although Yamamoto's exploration of the "hither and thither" of his title did go on rather.
Jennifer Higdon's 2003 Piano Trio is a skilful, albeit conservative piece, colour-coded for emotion with a Pale Yellow first movement and Fiery Red second. The musicians kept energy-levels well primed, especially in its rip-roaring red pages.
Raimundo Penaforte's An Eroica Trio is almost gleefully eclectic, with nods to everything from Piazzolla and Ravel to Brazilian boogie-woogie.
Artistry was lavished on an uneven score. The first movement had one wanting unsullied Piazzolla, the last, a few riffs from Pinetop Perkins.
Brown's hypnotic pizzicato chords at the opening of its second movement, leading his colleagues to a blurred hinterland somewhere between Ravel and Mingus. made the aptly titled Maurice the most memorable of Penaforte's three pieces.
Eve de Castro-Robinson's At Water's Birth continues the group's laudable series of local commissions. There were familiar de Castro-Robinson hallmarks in the deliberated chords, her fascination with augmented harmonies and spider-on-hot-plate cadenzas; new departures had the musicians intoning Denys Trussell's imagistic poetry, most effectively in duo, and, at two crucial points, the tinting of prepared piano.
The composer admits to meandering sections suggesting water-like qualities, but de Castro-Robinson's sure, almost theatrical, instinct never fails her.
Whether plotting the density of treading chords, releasing violin and cello in skybound duet or climaxing with a dramatic "Shhhh" over a bone-shaking trill, At Water's Birth shows us that expressive and explosive are not mutually exclusive states.
