REVIEW Besides being one of our country’s premier ensembles, NZTrio is celebrated for its imaginative and curatorially cohesive programming. Sunday night’s Unquiet Dream , the first in 2024′s Triptych series, was no exception —with three demanding scores followed by a much-loved 19th-century classic. Britten’s Introduction and Allegro bristles with the determination of an 18-year-old composer searching for his voice.
NZTrio effortlessly took up his case — especially in an exceedingly busy and well-argued Allegro. Chris Cree Brown’s The Second Triumvirate is the latest of the group’s laudable local commissions, and what extraordinary fury and tension are compressed into its seven-and-a-half minutes. At times, Amalia Hall, Ashley Brown and Sarah Watkins brandished their mettle with almost gladiatorial sparring.
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 .
