Transform | 2026 Storytellers Season Cont.
- New Zealand String Quartet
- Aug 4
- 6 min read
Presenting: Transform, the second programme in our 2026 Storytellers Season, exploring the art of storytelling.
Tauranga | Sunday 9 August
Wellington | Wednesday 12 August
Nelson | Friday 28 August
Blenheim| Saturday19 September
To read programme notes for our concerts in Paeroa (6 August), Taupō (7 August), Te Pahū (8 August), Hanmer Springs (29 August), Granity (30 August) or Kaikoura (18 September) click here and for the concert in Christchurch with Ariana Tikao click here
PROGRAMME NOTES
Henry Purcell (1659 – 1695)
Chacony in G minor Z.730 (c. 1680) (arr. Britten 1947, rev. 1963)
This year, marking the 50th anniversary of Benjamin Britten's death, it is fitting that we open our concert with his arrangement of Henry Purcell's Chacony in G minor. We hear two musical voices at once: the unmistakable elegance of Purcell's seventeenth-century Baroque style, reimagined through Britten's expressive twentieth-century musical language. Far more than a respectful transcription, Britten's arrangement allows Purcell's music to speak with a fresh, modern voice, revealing the profound admiration one composer held for another across nearly three centuries.
The chaconne is a form built on repetition and transformation, in which a recurring harmonic pattern provides the foundation for continual variation. Perhaps its most celebrated example is J.S. Bach's monumental Chaconne from the Partita in D minor for solo violin, where this simple structural principle becomes the basis for extraordinary invention and emotional depth. Britten approaches Purcell's work in a similarly expansive spirit, enriching the original with a broader palette of colour and inviting performers to explore a more Romantic sound-world.
Hearing Purcell's Chacony through Britten's lens also provides an illuminating prelude to Britten's own Chacony, the final movement of his Second String Quartet. Together, the two works reveal a compelling musical conversation between past and present, demonstrating how great music can be continually renewed while remaining deeply rooted in old traditions.
By Peter Clark
Anthony Ritchie (NZ) (1960-)
String Quartet No.3, ‘In Time’ Op. 221 (2023)
III. Perpetual Motion
V. Last Dance
The work is a meditation on the passing of time and explores the temporal nature of our existence; at the same time, it celebrates the joy of creating and performing music in time with each other.
This performance features two movements from the work. Perpetual Motion evokes the steady swing of a pendulum, creating an uneasy reflection on the brevity of our lives through constantly evolving rhythmic energy. Last Dance brings the work to a compelling close with a clockwork character, relentlessly building interlocking patterns over a persistent ostinato, recalling thematic material from the opening movement and suggesting time's inexorable onward motion.
In Time was written for The Jade Quartet in Auckland: Miranda Adams and Liu-Yi Retallick on violins, Robert Ashworth on viola and James Yoo on cello. It was premiered at Ferndale House in Auckland, June 24, 2023.
Dedicated to Diana Gash.
By Anthony Ritchie
Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel (1805-1847)
String Quartet in E flat major, H.277 (1834)
I. Adagio ma non troppo
II. Allegretto
III. Romanze
IV. Allegro molto vivace
It is difficult to imagine that Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel, a composer of extraordinary ability, saw so little of her music reach the public during her lifetime. Yet social conventions in early nineteenth-century Berlin left little room for women of her class to pursue public artistic careers. Her brother Felix’s reservations also shaped her path, leaving much of her music to be heard only in the family’s celebrated Sunday musicales.
Composed in 1834, her only string quartet is one of the first surviving examples of this genre written by a female composer. It received just one private performance during her lifetime and was not published until 1988. Reworking material from an unfinished piano sonata begun five years earlier, Fanny created a work of striking originality and emotional depth.
Beethoven’s influence, especially that of the “Harp” Quartet, Op. 74, is unmistakable, yet the quartet’s distinctive structure (slow, fast, slow, fast) and adventurous harmonic language reveal Fanny‘s unique musical voice. The opening movement sustains a remarkable sense of harmonic uncertainty before finally arriving at the tonic of E-flat major with an air of inevitability, while the scherzo remains both light and elusive. A lyrical slow movement forms the emotional heart of the work, and the energetic finale transforms earlier ideas into a triumphant conclusion.
Although Fanny sometimes doubted her ability to sustain large-scale musical forms, this quartet proves otherwise. It stands as an extraordinary achievement, remarkable for its originality, ambition, and expressive power.
By Martin Smith
Interval
Salina Fisher (1993-)
Heal (2020)
I wrote this piece for the UK-based Marmen Quartet during 2020 – a year of many challenges for all of us around the world, including myself personally. Through writing this piece I wanted to explore the relationship between music-making and healing: whether creating music can be part of a healing process; thinking about what it means to share physical space, to create sound together, to breathe together, and to find space and unity with each other. I wrote this piece while I was living at Lilburn House, a composer residence surrounded on all sides by native plants and birdlife, very close to the Wellington Botanic Gardens. It was particularly special to feel the natural world thriving and healing during a pause in human activity at that time. I’m very honoured to have this piece included on NZSQ’s 2026 season.
By Salina Fisher
Benjamin Britten (1913-1976)
String Quartet No. 2, in C major, Op. 36 (1945)
I. Allegro calmo, senza rigore
II. Vivace
III. Chacony: sostenuto
While still enjoying the success of Peter Grimes (1945), Benjamin Britten turned his attention to several new compositions, including his String Quartet No. 2. Written as part of the 250th anniversary commemorations of Henry Purcell’s death, the quartet reflects Britten’s deep admiration for the composer he revered above all others.
Rejecting the pastoral nationalism of Vaughan Williams and his contemporaries, Britten sought a modern English musical voice through Purcell’s example. Writing to Mary Behrend, he described the quartet as “the greatest advance I have yet made,” suggesting he had discovered a new compositional direction.
Completed after Britten returned from Germany, where he accompanied Yehudi Menuhin in concerts for survivors of Nazi concentration camps, the quartet carries a remarkable emotional intensity. Its three movements unfold on a symphonic scale: two expansive outer movements surround a tense and unsettling central scherzo.
Purcell’s influence is most clearly felt in Britten’s use of Baroque-inspired forms and gestures, culminating in the finale titled Chacony, using Purcell’s own spelling. Heard alongside Purcell’s Chacony earlier in tonight’s programme, Britten’s finale reveals the enduring influence of a composer who remained a constant source of inspiration throughout his life.
A Personal reflection
2026 marks the 50th anniversary of Benjamin Britten’s death, and the New Zealand String Quartet are commemorating this milestone by centring their season around performances of all three of his remarkable string quartets.
Around a decade ago, I had the privilege of being invited by the Britten–Pears Foundation to stay for a week in Britten’s home in Aldeburgh, on the east coast of England. It was a surreal experience to wake each morning in the very place that inspired so many of his most significant works. Aldeburgh has changed very little over the years, and I felt a vivid connection to the environment that shaped Britten’s creative life.
Britten was a committed pacifist — an outlook that profoundly informed both his life and his music, particularly works written during and after World War II. Experiencing his music today, in a world still marked by conflict and uncertainty, brings an added poignancy.
It is a special privilege to perform these extraordinary quartets across Aotearoa New Zealand as a member of our national string quartet, sharing music that speaks not only of its time, but also so eloquently to our own.
by Peter Clark
MUSICIANS
New Zealand String Quartet
Gillian Ansell – Viola
Peter Clark – Violin
Martin Smith – Cello
Peter Andreas Nielsen – Guest Violin
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