Australia Ensemble at the Auckland Town Hall

By HEATH LEES

No one would deny that Beethoven's first three piano trios - his Opus 1 - were assertive and individual for the time.

They are a beating of the drum from a precocious Rhinelander in his early 20s, recently arrived in Vienna and eager to attract attention.

But the tie that binds Beethoven's youthful chamber music to the elegant drawing-room world of Haydn and Mozart is still very much in evidence in these trios - even the third one of the set, which opened the concert on Monday night, and is cast in Beethoven's "stormy" key of C minor.

For a while, the three young players from the Australia Ensemble saw only the storms and stresses, revving up the score with large contrasts and unexpected plunges.

You felt they were seizing Beethoven by the throat, just as he himself said he would do with fate, half a dozen years later.

More relaxed by the third movement, the group drew a greater degree of line and charm from the music, especially in the rippling C-major Trio.

This displayed Ian Munro's beautifully articulated pianism to perfection, and carried an element of poise into the hectic finale.

Elena Kats-Chernin's Gypsy Ramble doesn't worry too much about poise but oozes confidence in a far-flung musical style.

It bundles the energy of folk-music into stylised moments of tango, whiffs of pop songs, cabaret-like schmalz, and easy-to-follow sections, many of them sporting a recurring tonal centre.

The only way to play such ebullient music is simply to give it heaps, and that is exactly what the players did here.

The Ensemble pounded happily through dissonant minefields one minute, tenderly extended a note to infinity the next, and brought together the whole collage in an extrovert performance that brought the warmest applause of the evening.

With Brahms' late, B-minor clarinet quintet, the ensemble found a natural affinity straight away.

Scorning a romantic vibrato in favour of purity of tone with marvellously judged gradations, Catherine McCorkill's clarinet breathed peace over the string landscape of Brahms' gentle and reflective music.

Here at last was real maturity, enjoyed by audience and performers alike.