New Zealand String Quartet at the Auckland Town Hall Concert Chamber

By WILLIAM DART

As concepts go, the "Life and Love" theme of the New Zealand String Quartet's concerts must go down as one of the most tenuous. While the paths of life and love can be strewn with disappointments, Auckland audiences had two more specific gripes.

Two advertised and much-anticipated works by Alban Berg had been replaced, through the indisposition of violist Gillian Ansell.

A similar thing happened two years ago when evenings of Janacek and Schulhoff ended up as a mini-festival of Dvorak duos, trios and quintets.

This time, we at least stayed with the quartet repertoire, thanks to violist Victoria Jaenecke, whose vibrant tone was an asset, particularly in the bigger-bodied works.

The first concert was the less successful. Wolf's offbeat Italian Serenade scurried away with the NZSQ's customary rhythmic drive but proved an elusive opener.

Berg's Opus 3 was replaced by Ross Harris' Duo for violin and cello. Passing over the issue of just why a local composer should only be included when something else falls through (New Zealand composers experience life and love too!), Helene Pohl and Rolf Gjelsten played the work as if it were theirs. Which it is, in a sense, as Harris wrote it for them.

Duo is deviously subtle, particularly in the way that Harris recasts his musical material, and these changes were caught with such resonance that at times one could have sworn there were more than two players on stage.

The unswerving directness with which Shostakovich's Eighth Quartet was delivered, its Largo movements suspended poignantly in time, didn't always work for Smetana's From My Life. Here, thrilling, passionate outbursts did not compensate for patches of intonation in the Finale that went beyond the bounds of rusticity.

If the audience for this concert was the smallest I have ever seen the NSZQ attract, the second night brought along even fewer yet this was the more consistent evening. There was a feeling for the style and substance of Mozart's K421, although it needed more beauty of line and tonal gradation to be totally convincing. Pohl's intonation was often a cause for concern.

Borodin's popular D major Quartet, replacing Berg's Lyric Suite, was a relaxing experience for both players and audience, drawing forth a hushed appreciation during its famous Notturno.

Hushed wasn't quite the word when it came to Schubert's Death and the Maiden, which suffered the indignity of what sounded like a hand-drying machine punctuating some of its softer moments.

This had some of the best playing I've heard from the group, particularly when the more raw emotions of the outside movements were given voice and the Trio of the Scherzo had a nimble grace that was particularly fetching.