Manifesto, Rippon Hall, Wānaka, Sunday, October 15
The last show of Queenstown-Lakes’ At the World’s Edge classical music festival presented spirited, uplifting work featuring love letters, alternate universes and a popular crowd-pleaser for a big finish.
Following the theme of identity, this year’s festival composer in residence Victoria Kelly dug deep into her childhood for the world premiere of her commission Ensemble, written for French horn, violin and cello.
Kelly considered how children make so many decisions with no idea of what the consequences might be — and wondered how many different lives she might have had if she had made different calls.
Translating that to music, Ensemble explores the possibilities of what could happen if instruments could swap sonic universes.
The resulting interplay of horn (Benjamin Goldscheider), violin (Vesa-Matti Leppanen) and cello (Alice Neary) gives us jumbled glimpses of alternative worlds, instruments exchanging traditional roles and colliding realities creating tremendously effective moods.
It’s a triumphantly bold composition culminating in an exquisite fade as if receding across the lake behind the players.
Earlier, Czech Leos Janacek’s Intimate Letters also had abrupt changes of mood expressing complex deeply held emotions.
Violinists Benjamin Baker and Marike Kruup, cellist Rolf Gjelsten and Jordan Bak (viola) gave us many-layered depth and a mix of beauty and busyness in this romantic and thrilling work.
Finishing off, if you want exuberance and big, loud sweeping statements that are as much fun to play as to listen to, you don’t need to go past Tchaikovsky.
His exciting and accessible Souvenir de Florence is his last piece of chamber music and his only piece for a string sextet, enthusiastically and obviously enjoyed by Baker and Justine Cormack (violin), Bak and Tobias Breider (viola) and Neary and Gjelsten (cello).
Energetic, dramatic, exhausting, it was a fitting close to a great festival held in a great location with the backdrop of the snow-topped Southern Alps behind Lake Wanaka. Bravo.
— Review by Nigel Zega
