Photo: Run in the shadows
The At The World's Edge Festival aims to bring Classical music to the Central Lakes region of New Zealand. And what a stunning background this landscape around Queenstown provides for this beautiful music.
The theme of the 2024 festival is folk music. Folk music in general is a celebration of cultures and peoples and offers a vast range of musical ideas. Folk music is quite possibly the oldest form of music and has inspired lots of composers over the centuries. Much of the music played at the festival is from that special collision of worlds: folk and classical.
Violinist Justine Cormack and Benjamin Baker are the festival directors. Each year they invite a stellar group of individual artists from New Zealand and around the globe to the festival. They then form chamber music groups for each concert. The internationally acclaimed musicians who assembled in Queenstown this time are:
Photo: © 2024 Run in the shadows, all rights reserved.
Julian Bliss - clarinet
Alexi Kenney, Marike Kruup, Benjamin Baker, Justine Cormack - violins
Bryony Gibson-Cornish, Serenity Thurlow - violas
Sterling Elliott, Ian Greenberg - cellos
Daniel Lebhardt - piano
Lorna Zhang (violin) and Madeleine Xiao (piano) - emerging NZ musicians
Each year the festival features a New Zealand composer as composer in residence. Which means that the composer writes a new work to be performed at the festival, and each concert includes older pieces by that composer. In 2024 Eve de Castro-Robinson was invited. To open the first concert, here is a new piece by Eve de Castro-Robinson, called Bird-sung sky. It is played here by Justine Cormack and Benjamin Baker.
Photo: © 2024 Run in the shadows, all rights reserved.
Next is a piece by Sergei Prokofiev. It’s his String Quartet No. 2 in F Op 92 Karbadinian. Prokofiev rarely incorporates folk influences in his music, but this string quartet is inspired by the local music of Nalchik. A city in the northern Caucasus where he was evacuated to during World War II.
The violinists in this performance are Alexi Kenney and Benjamin Baker, the viola is played by Bryony Gibson-Cornish, and the cellist is Sterling Elliott.
Photo: © 2024 Run in the shadows, all rights reserved.
Next in this concert we move to a piece by Chinese-born American composer Bright Sheng. Sheng travelled through Northwest China about 50 years ago and heard lots of local folk music there. He incorporated that local music into his Concertino for clarinet and string quartet. It’s a dynamic piece in a totally different language to the previous Prokofiev. When we think of traditional Chinese music, we think of the five-tone pentatonic scale. This piece is more based on something like the mixolydian scale, but it still has that distinct Chinese sound.
The clarinettist in this performance is Julian Bliss; violinists are Justine Cormack and Lorna Zhang, Serenity Thurlow is on viola and Ian Greenberg on cello.
Another piece by Eve de Castro-Robinson now. It’s for solo piano and played by Madeleine Xiao. It’s called This Liquid Drift of Light. The title is borrowed from a poet friend of Eve de Castro-Robinson‘s called Dennis Trussell. She likes to use his words for titles of her pieces because they allow her to conjure up imaginative sounds. This is a landscape prelude and depicts the play of light on the water of Kawhia Harbour. It was originally commissioned by New Zealand Pianist Stephen de Pledge who happens to be Madeline Xiao’s teacher.
Photo: © 2024 Run in the shadows, all rights reserved.
The last piece of this concert is a monumental rollercoaster of late romantic music, full of folk melodies from Hungary. It’s an early piece of Hungarian composer Béla Bartók. He wrote it as a young graduate while he was beginning to explore a national musical language as a way to express his own Hungarian identity. You can hear traces of his later musical language, but it’s still very much steeped in romantic music. The Piano Quintet in C is performed by Pianist Daniel Lebhardt, and he is joined by violinist Benjamin Baker and Justine Cormack, viola player Bryony Gibson-Cornish, and cellist Ian Greenberg.
Recorded on 05 October 2024 at Te Atamira, Queenstown
Recording Engineer & Producer: Adrian Hollay
Listen to the other concerts of the 2024 At The World's Edge Festival here:
At The World's Edge Festival 2024 - Concert 2: Fantazi
At The World's Edge Festival 2024 - Concert 3: Out of Doors
At The World's Edge Festival 2024 - Concert 4: Refraction
