100 Winds: Taupō Hau Rau at Q Theatre review - William Dart

Chamber Music New Zealand’s 2025 season opener is anything but traditional. Photo / John McDermott

The mysterious, shadow-laden stage of Q Theatre’s Rangatira space suggested that Chamber Music New Zealand’s launch of its 2025 season would not be a traditional chamber music affair.

100 Winds: Taupō Hau Rau presented the New Zealand String Quartet in partnership with Moss Te Ururangi Patterson’s New Zealand Dance Company, setting the complex weave of the many winds around Lake Taupō to the patterned gleam of New York minimalist music.

Three now-classic string quartets by Philip Glass, delivered with the NZSQ’s signature commitment, were the musical core of the evening.

With new guest personnel on board, including prize-winning young cellist Matthias Balzat, the ensemble was remarkably incisive, from the testing unison of its opening lines to the translucent harmonies of the closing Mishima Quartet. Throughout, sensitive amplification added theatrical impact.

Early on, the sonorous finale to Glass’s Fourth Quartet was followed by spoken words, seemingly from the darkest recesses of the stage. The four dancers entered to pursue their remarkable transformation of the American’s music into lithe and boundless physical energy.

In the printed programme, Patterson talked of the beauty of uncertainty, and our being influenced by the winds of the past, present and future; before the concert, in an interview, he stressed the importance of lightness, kindness and generosity, catching the essence of his dancers’ fluid and responsive interactions.

Their interpretation of Glass’s pulsating and shifting textures was effortlessly organic, working through Patterson’s beautifully choreographed rushes, moments of respite and inventive groupings. The swirl of flowing costumes, designed by Patterson himself, provided a further visual complement to those Taupō winds, heightened by Ella Madsen Brough’s atmospheric lighting design.

Cultural borders were unexpectedly broken when the dancers themselves entered the minimalist sound world to add the whir of taonga pūoro or their own stabbing vocals to Steve Reich’s Clapping Music, catching the chop of the wind on Taupō waters.

Where Glass’ music often lulled in waves of hypnotic shimmer, the Reich piece called for 16 hands, palm to palm, bringing musicians and dancers together in memorable and symbolic unity.

100 Winds: Taupō Hau Rau is on tonight, April 3 at Papa Hou, Christchurch at 7.30pm, and on Saturday, April 5 at Soundings Theatre, Te Papa, also at 7.30pm.

What: 100 Winds: Taupō Hau Rau

Where: Q Theatre

When: Saturday