Aroha Quartet with Vyvyan Yendoll (viola), Philip Green (clarinet). Mozart: String Quintet in G minor, Clarinet Quintet in A. Hunter Council Chamber, Monday
When I first heard this string quartet, in December 2004, I had prided myself on recognising something special, and subsequent hearings have confirmed it as one of the finest ensembles to emerge, largely from the NZSO.
This concert, on a wet night, will undoubtedly register, for me, as one of the loveliest of 2006 and it saddened me that so few had put it in their diaries.
Two of their orchestral colleagues joined them to perform two of the most beautiful of Mozart's compositions, with an accomplished brilliance and a soulfulness that repeatedly brought that old prickling feeling to my eyes.
Does their name suggest a long-awaited quartet formed by tangata whenua? No. They are four highly gifted Chinese string players, schooled in their own country and now working here - three of them in the NZSO.
They played the sombre first two G minor movements of the String Quintet (Vyvyan Yendoll, the additional viola) with a feeling of sublime intensity, and then the subdued Adagio, in perfect balance and tonal unity. The surprisse of the performance was their speed in the final Allegro, but so deep is the groups's instinct for the music that it quickly assumed inevitability.
Though the first violin, Haihong Liu, led the group with an elasticity of rhythm and an exquisite beauty of tone, there were no second fiddles. Second violin Beiyi Xue was only distinguishable by the timbre of her instrument while the playing of cellist Jianxin Chen was always deeply expressive.
Yendoll took the first viola part, in complete harmony with the quartet, though understandably having a little more limelight than the quartet's own superb violist Zhongxian Jin.
Mozart's Clarinet Quintet in A major is one of the most glorious works of his entire output. By no means is it a showcase for the clarinet; however, perhaps through an acoustic quirk, Philip Green's clarinet often seemed to dominate, occasionally lacking light and shade. In any event, nothing could have been more ravishing than the flowing clarinet over the perfectly harmonious fabric supplied by the strings in the Larghetto slow movement or the wonderful impetus of the successive variations of the ecstatic last movement.