Chamber Music NZ Presents: The St Lawrence String Quartet

Canada’s premier chamber music ensemble, St Lawrence String Quartet returns to New Zealand for a 10 centre tour as the final concert in Chamber Music New Zealand’s 2009 ‘Kaleidoscopes’ season.

The New Zealand tour includes two very special concerts in Auckland and Wellington when they join with the New Zealand String Quartet to perform Mendelssohn’s joyous Octet for Strings.

The St Lawrence String Quartet has performed close to 2000 concerts since forming in 1989 and burst onto international stages after winning the Banff International String Quartet Competition in 1992.

The quartet, consisting of Geoff Nuttall (violin), Lesley Robertson (viola), Christopher Costanza (cello) and recently joined by Scott St John (violin), regularly perform across North and South America, Europe, Asia and Australasia. This New Zealand tour will be their third visit to New Zealand and the first with Scott St John in the position of second violin.

In the programme for Napier we hear the last full quartets of our featured composers. The Haydn is a demonstration of his hallmark inventiveness, though tinged with sadness, and Mendelssohn’s an impassioned outpouring written after the death of his sister Fanny. In between these two classics of the repertoire is a new work by John Adams. This new work is to be premiered by the quartet in the US in January, 2009. Described in Gramophone as “provocative, challenging and incredibly popular”, John Adams asked the St Lawrence if he could write this work after hearing them perform his earlier quartet.

Event listed by SWPR Ltd

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