Featuring the talented ex-Palmerston North cellist Robert Ibell, the Aroha Quartet has made a name for itself presenting a range of works sometimes outside the mainstream concert programmes.

The quartet also takes opportunities to explore chamber music repertoire together with other musicians - and so it was that Tuesday night's concert featured the Aroha Quartet with Catherine McKay on the piano performing Schumann's much loved Piano Quintet.

The work itself is marvellous, full of glorious melody and rich ensemble opportunities, all revealed in their full splendour, as the ensemble obviously took great joy in making music together, responding superbly to the enormous detailed emotional demands of the work.

The quartet itself (Haihong Liu and Blythe Press on violin, Zhongxian Jin on viola with Ibell himself on cello) performed Beethoven's String Quartet in B flat Opus 16, No 6, and Britten's String Quartet No 3.

Beethoven's Quartet is full of rhythmic intricacy revealed with beautiful expression throughout, while Britten's work was a superb complement to the programme.

Celebrating the hundredth anniversary of the composer's birth, the work is full of harmonic and textural interest passing as perhaps an epitaph for the composer himself - being full of themes from his opera Death in Venice, in a form that the composer never actually lived to hear on the concert platform.

This was a most engaging performance, full of vitality, expressive intensity and a great commitment to the music, ensuring that the evening was a real joy for the audience throughout.