2022 Subscriptions are now open.

Subscriptions to our 2022 season are available until 31 January 2022. Please see our 2022 season page and subscription for details. 

Please note that there is an error in the brochure. The NZTrio concert is on Thursday 21 April.
NZ String Quartet Update
There will be TWO sessions of the NZ String Quartet concert on Tuesday 9 November.

The first session will be at 4:00 PM and will finish at approximately 6:00 PM. The second session will be at our normal time of 7:30 PM (and finish at approximately 9:30 PM).

The 7:30 PM session is sold out. However tickets to the 4:00 PM session are available on Eventfinda
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Tickets

Our Next Concert

Tuesday 9 November - New Zealand String Quartet - New Date

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Helene Pohl (violin)
Monique Lapins (violin)
Gillian Ansell (viola) 
Rolf Gjelsten (cello)

Purcell - Three Fantazias
Britten - String Quartet No. 2 in C
Gao Ping - Prayer Songs
Smetana - String Quartet No. 2 in D minor

Tickets

The ensemble has been Quartet-in-Residence at the New Zealand School of Music at Victoria University of Wellington since 1991 and in 2019 celebrated 25 years running the Adam Summer School for Chamber Music. Violinist Helene Pohl and violist Gillian Ansell are co-artistic directors of the biennial Adam Chamber Music Festival in Nelson. Gillian, Helene and cellist Rolf Gjelsten have received MNZM honours for services to music in New Zealand.
Upbeat Interview

On Friday 15 October Tony Ryan was interviewed on RNZ Concert's Upbeat programme. He was reviewing our 2022 season. To hear this interview please click on the button,
Christopher’s Classics 2022 – Series XXVII
Reviewer Tony Ryan looks forward to the expanded programme for the 2022 season.

With a few modifications of date, programme and personnel, Christopher’s Classics in 2020 and 2021 have been a life-saver for Christchurch concert-goers. For 2022, an ambitious ten-concert schedule with top-line New Zealand musicians and even more affordable ticket prices comes as a much-needed booster dose of musical excellence after the uncertainties of these last two years.

2022’s CHRISTOPHER MARSHALL CONCERT (which proved to be a highlight of the 2021 series) this time features baritone Will King in a recital of English and French songs accompanied by David Codd. The programme includes Britten’s wonderful Songs and Proverbs of William Blake, which I’m especially looking forward to. Will King has already made a notably favourable impression on those who have heard him recently so, apart from this welcome opportunity of having a singer in the 2022 season, I’m very much looking forward to hearing this rising star in the Christopher’s Classics opening concert in March.

PIANO TRIO ENSEMBLES are quite a thematic thread running through the 2022 series. Three such groups can be heard in April, June and July; four if you count the welcome return of the Morton Trio, also in July, with French horn replacing the cello of the other ensembles. The very wide range of repertoire that these trios are scheduled to play easily justifies their inclusion in this expanded season, and it will make for some fascinating comparisons as the different personalities bring their individual insights to the music-making. All three of the standard ensembles will include works by New Zealand composers: in July the Levansa Trio will play Ultraviolet by Claire Cowan, while both the NZ Chamber Soloists and the NZTrio will première new commissions whose details are yet to be announced. The NZ Chamber Soloists’ programme is a very innovative mix of New Zealand-Chinese-American works along with Shostakovich’s rarely heard First Piano Trio, and I’m rather excited to see that NZTrio’s programme also includes a work by Nikolai Kapustin, who died just last year at the age of 82, and whose music has been receiving increasing attention in recent years. Another interesting feature of these concerts is that NZTrio and Levansa Trio will each include a Beethoven Piano Trio, which just happen to be the same two that the Argyle Trio played in the 2021 series – so this will make another fascinating comparison; it’s always intriguing to hear the diversity of approaches as different musicians bring their own individual vision to the music, especially the great Archduke Trio which is always a favourite. 

PIANIST LIAM WOODING, who appears in July with the Morton Trio, returns in September with an enticing solo programme of Mozart, Bach-Busoni, Prokofiev (the quirky and inventive Vision Fugitives) and a Sonata by Australian composer Carl Vine. The inclusion of the occasional solo musician in the Christopher’s Classics series is always a welcome feature.

TWO STRING ENSEMBLES are scheduled for August and September. The Aroha String Quartet have an appealing programme of Mendelssohn, Brahms and John Psathas, along with a real favourite of mine – Shostakovich’s Tenth String Quartet. Strings Amore is the other string group, which comprises five of New Zealand’s finest players in a programme of baroque works by Vivaldi, Graupner, Telemann and Bach. This concert features Donald Maurice on viola d’amore, one of the baroque era’s most exquisitely beautiful and favourite instruments.

TWO DUOS complete the 2022 line-up. In May the Darroch Cowan Duo bring a collection of pieces for flute and guitar by composers from both North and South America, while the 2022 series ends in October with a programme of songs arranged for cello and piano from originals by Schubert, Glazunov, Dvořák,
Schumann and Brahms. For this concert Andrew Joyce and Rae de Lisle will no doubt be reprising some of the tracks that we often hear on RNZ Concert from their album Morgen released in 2020, although that disc doesn’t include Glazunov. Personally, such arrangements of well-known vocal gems have the effect of making me wish for the originals with all the textual expression and tension that only the human voice can deliver. However, the cello is far more suitable for such instrumental alternatives than the interminable flute or clarinet arrangements that seem prevalent and, depending what the year throws at us, I may well be ready for some good easy-to-listen-to tunes, so I do look forward to this opportunity to hear two such fine musicians as the icing on the cake in what looks like a series of enormous variety and tantalising repertoire.
Christopher's Classics 7 October 2021
Les Bons Vivants
Amandine Guerin & Cathy Irons (violins), Mark Menzies (viola), Tomas Hurnik (cello), Helen Webby (harp), Anthony Ferner (flute), David McGregor (clarinet).

Reviewed by Tony Ryan.

Les Bons Vivants last appeared in a Christopher’s Classics concert almost exactly two years ago when I remember wishing that they’d managed to include Ravel’s Introduction and Allegro for Harp, Flute, Clarinet and String Quartet. That would have required an additional violinist, and a clarinet instead of the 2019 programme’s oboe. Tonight, with that slight change of personnel, my wish was granted in a truly magical performance in which all seven players rose to every inventive twist and turn of Ravel’s imagination. While the wind players added beautifully-phrased tonal richness to the work’s opulent melodies and fluttered through its diaphanous textures, and the strings brought myriad subtle textural variety to the music’s endlessly colourful timbres, it was the harp that added an extraordinary array of virtuosity and shimmering incandescence to the performance.  

I have always thought of Ravel’s Introduction and Allegro as more of a harp concerto than a chamber work in which all the players are equals, and tonight Helen Webby certainly dominated our attention and brought a true soloist’s perspective to the piece. The brief harp cadenzas sparkled in their variety of timbres, but Webby also blended sensitively with the other instruments when required, always adding something special to a work which should be heard in concert more often. 

Perhaps it’s the work’s unusual combination of instruments that has prevented me from ever previously encountering it in a live performance, and it might have been the only item on the programme that employed all seven musicians if Les Bons Vivants and Christopher’s Classics hadn’t commissioned Christchurch composer Pieta Hextall to write something for the same scoring. Her The Poetics of Water ended the first part of tonight’s concert, just as Ravel’s work ended the second. 

Hextall’s textures are predominantly sparser than Ravel’s intertwining, almost Rousseau-like, forest of colours, shadows, and bursts of glistening light, but she demonstrates a very broad palette of her own colours, textures and rhythmic variety. Inspiration for both music and title comes from a sequence of poems by John Allison, readings of which (on this occasion from the poet himself) are integrated with the music. The first musical sounds represent the onomatopoeic nature of the sounds of rain which the composer then uses to develop an expressive soundscape that reflects the poem’s deeper meaning. This first movement of three was my favourite on a first hearing, with each instrument’s individual timbre used successfully in creating a wide range of effects. Rhythmic juxtapositions on the wind instruments contrasted engagingly with a wide variety of articulation on the strings, with the harp blending subtly in the textures despite its very dominant visual impact. 

In other movements, Hextall’s fondness for lower wind sounds (alto flute and bass clarinet) added further expressive colours to her imaginative exploration of the poems.

Tonight was the world première of The Poetics of Water and, although there is much to enjoy and engage on a first hearing, it’s certainly a work that will benefit from repeated listening. I did wonder if the music could stand alone, without the support of the interspersed reading of the poems, although they did help to focus our understanding on this first performance, even if Allison’s rather soft-grained voice doesn’t project easily into the auditorium – I was glad to be sitting near the front. 

Tonight’s programme opened with a work by another New Zealand woman composer. Dorothea Franchi’s 1947 Suite for clarinet, viola and harp was a delightful and appealing appetiser demonstrating the clear influence of the, then still living, Vaughan Williams, with its English folk song references that somehow brought some of Thomas Hardy’s descriptive rural scenes to mind.

The sheer Frenchness of André Caplet’s Conte Fantastique for harp and string quartet which followed, immediately struck me for its timbral similarities to the Ravel work that was to end tonight’s concert. Although a more angular and volatile piece, it was very reminiscent in its harmonies and colours of the chamber music of Ravel, Debussy, Françaix and others. The work was inspired by a rather ghoulish poem by Edgar Allen Poe which, in turn, inspired tonight’s performers to enter with masks (of the masked ball type, as opposed to the audience’s covid variety) – an excellent idea as a mood-setter for the music itself.
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The familiarity of Mozart’s great Clarinet Quintet proved an ideal contrast to the more impressionist works that surrounded it, and also served to highlight the energy, virtuosity and involvement of tonight’s performers. If not all of them quite demonstrated the intensely open and physical commitment of viola player Mark Menzies, they all brought a sense of personality and vitality to their performances, a quality that is, alas, too often missing from music-making. In the Mozart, clarinettist David McGregor in particular, brought a welcome show of spectacle and thrill to the soloistic nature of his part.
Acknowledgements:
  We thank The Rata Foundation, The Elizabeth Ball Charitable Trust,
Gloria Streat, Antonio Strings, Chamber Music New Zealand and private donors, ​whose patronage and sponsorship grants make these concerts possible.