NZTrio's Magnifique concert captivates with Schubert and Vasks

NZ Herald

12-05-2025

Schubert's one-movement Notturno offered eight minutes of total beguilement, delivered with true Viennese charm, its gentle hesitations hinting at a Strauss family waiting in the wings.
The truly magnificent and beating heart of the programme came with Episodi e canto perpetuo, a 1985 work by Latvian composer Peteris Vasks, an intensely moving response to Messiaen's classic Quartet for the End of Time.
There were close and specific parallels with the Messiaen, from a seat's edge, feverish dance in driving unisons to two oases of purest song, showcasing violinist Amalia Hall and the trio's new cellist Matthias Balzat.
These culminated in a heart-stopping finale, uncredited in the printed programme, that moves irrevocably upwards, as if to heaven, Vasks having achieved his 'song of love' after travelling a 'difficult road through evil, delusion and suffering'.
Here is a composer who navigates with enviable ease from traditional scoring – Bartok being inevitably referenced in two Burlesca movements – to the freer notations and effects of the later Lutoslawski.
Yet he has been woefully under-represented in our concert halls. In my many decades of concert-going, I only recall one instance: cellist David Geringas in 2011 stunning a town hall audience after his Dvorak concerto with a short Vasks encore.
After interval, Linda Dallimore's commissioned Self Portrait was short, agreeably astringent, and very much to the point, even if the young New Zealand composer had made more of its boppy final section, marked 'soulful, joyful, bluesy'.
Saint-Saens' Second Piano Trio proved a workout of Olympian proportions for pianist Somi Kim.
This is a sparkler of a score, with Hall and Balzat elegantly weaving around Kim's shifting, evanescent textures. All three musicians contributed equally to the brittle wit of its second movement, coming together in full strength for a thrilling, purposeful finale.
How pleasing it is to heartily recommend this concert before the NZTrio take Magnifique to Cambridge on Wednesday, Rotorua on Thursday and Whakatāne on Friday.