New Zealand String Quartet at the Concert Chamber, Auckland Town Hall

To some it might seem a strange way to celebrate a group's 10th birthday and proclaim its robust health, but the New Zealand String Quartet's Famous Last Words concerts were a fascinating take on composers' attitudes to life, death and capturing sound for eternity.

These seven last thoughts spanned from two movements of Haydn's Opus 107, in which the philosophical composer literally signed off with a song, to the harrowing despair of Shostakovich's Opus 144.

In the first concert, Haydn's ill-fated Andante and Menuetto were astonishing, the players milking the latter for the last drops of its chromatic drama.

At the other end of the scale, after interval, we were warned that Schubert's great G major Quartet was symphonic in its scope, although its massive chords and walls of tremolo weren't always focused.

Yet this Schubert never lacked a sense of character, with a few spots of sauntering nonchalance around Gillian Ansell's viola.

The high point of this evening was the six Adagios of Shostakovich's Fifteenth Quartet. Everything was spot-on here, from the furious pizzicato chords of the Serenade to the savage outbursts of the Funeral March.

The following evening, the group set off with short offerings from Mendelssohn and Beethoven, whose replacement Finale for his Opus 130 suffered from a surfeit of the NZSQ's familiar brute power tactics.

Again, the most successful item came from the group's 20th-century repertoire: Bartok's Sixth Quartet. The cool, melancholic textures of the opening Mesto, led by Ansell, set the tone.

Peter Scholes was soloist in Brahms' Clarinet Quintet. His opening arpeggio had just the right bloom to it, his Magyar flourishes in the Piu lento extraordinarily affecting. Alas, the strings, though sympathetic, didn't quite match their guest.