Once again, Laura Rickard curated this week-long festival of a dozen or so events, this year turning her attention to the elements: earth, air, fire and water. For the first concert I attended, the natural world was explored in a miscellany of works entitled ‘Fire and Ice’ and, typically, brought together several different instrumental combinations and soloists.
Grieg’s First String Quartet (1877-78) took up the lion’s share of the evening. While this cyclical work may not immediately suggest an association with the elements, it borrows one of his own songs about a water spirit who offers fiddlers musical gifts in exchange for their happiness. Certainly, the four players – Emma Roijackers, Luke Hsu (violins), Anuschka Cidlinsky (viola) and Lydia Hillerudh (cello), caught the temperamental nature of the opening movement to perfection, its agitato and tranquillo passages nicely differentiated, though it was the latter that brought a more gratifying tone, a feature that bookended the Romanze. The folk-influenced Intermezzo was suitably energetic (its wit nicely marked), and the challenges of the Saltarello finale were dispatched with relish. If Grieg’s orchestral sonorities sounded unyielding, there was no denying the life-affirming close.
Earlier, there had been more recognisable connections to nature including Arctic Night by Amy Beach – the first of four pieces originally for piano called Eskimos. In this arrangement, Lauren Rickard’s rich-toned violin and Coby Mendez’s delicate guitar amply underlined the expressive qualities of this salon-like work. Either side were two solo piano contributions: Ziteng Fan brought finesse to Debussy’s exquisite miniature The Snow is Dancing (Children’s Corner), neatly delineating the melody between its shimmering textures, while Ke Ma impressed in Scriabin’s Vers la flamme (1914) unveiling its heady mysticism and accumulating figuration with remarkable poise, seemingly unperturbed by the work’s virtuosic demands.
Arguably, the most arresting piece arrived at the start with Maclaren Summit, a movement forming the central panel of John Luther Adam’s The Wind in High Places. Inspired by the sound of Aeolian harps that draw their sound directly from the wind, Adams writes for a string quartet that uses only open strings and natural harmonics. Situated up in the build’s gallery, the four players – Luke Hsu, Ruslan Talas (violins), Anuschka Cidlinsky (viola) and Lydia Hillerudh (cello) – produced an ear-tickling evocation as compelling as it was haunting.
