William Dart review: NZTrio’s fury, tension and determination makes for a ‘fairly intense’ programme

NZTrio playing for its home crowd in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland on May 19 at Auckland Town Hall. Photo / Supplied

REVIEW

Besides being one of our country’s premier ensembles, NZTrio is celebrated for its imaginative and curatorially cohesive programming.

Sunday night’s Unquiet Dream, the first in 2024′s Triptych series, was no exception —with three demanding scores followed by a much-loved 19th-century classic.

Britten’s Introduction and Allegro bristles with the determination of an 18-year-old composer searching for his voice. NZTrio effortlessly took up his case — especially in an exceedingly busy and well-argued Allegro.

Chris Cree Brown’s The Second Triumvirate is the latest of the group’s laudable local commissions, and what extraordinary fury and tension are compressed into its seven-and-a-half minutes. At times, Amalia Hall, Ashley Brown and Sarah Watkins brandished their mettle with almost gladiatorial sparring.

This composer fashions his music with absolute lucidity. Everything here stems from a stab of piano that inexorably extends, transporting us into new and wonderful sonic worlds, in which fragile whispers succumb to a swirl of harsher sonorities, before a final, hushed appeasement.

Amalia Hall suggested that we may hear echoes of Shostakovich and Harry Potter in Lera Auerbach’s Trio No 2. Certainly, the former’s shadow loomed over a lop-sided satiric waltz, and Vivaldi’s spirit might have been roused somewhat at the visceral thrashing in Auerbach’s fourth movement, exciting enough to propel one to the seat-edge. However, sensitivities settled when Ashley Brown’s poetic cello unfolded the exquisitely sad melody of its finale.

After interval, Sarah Watkins, a founding member of NZTrio deputising this year for pianist Somi Kim, announced Mendelssohn’s D minor Trio as a relaxant, after a “fairly intense first half”.

It was all that and more — music of cool elegance from an age free of the anguishes and horrors of our own. This composer has no urgent messaging for us, apart from enjoying the unruffled beauty that pours from his pen. Which we did, marvelling at Watkins’ electrifying ripples in its first movement and enchanted to the last gossamer thread, by the scherzo’s Mendelssohnian fairyland.

What: NZTrio

Where: Town Hall Concert Chamber

When: Sunday, May 19