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
