1 Feb 2004 : Celestial Event

New Zealand Trio: Sarah Watkins (piano), Justine Cormack (violin), and Ashley Brown (cello). At the Music Academy of the West, Sunday, February 1.

Music has to have some edges, otherwise it leaves no mark on me. Except for the first piece, the program of the New Zealand Trio was virtually all edges, of one kind or another, and rather starkly emotional to boot. The trio has a big sound. They managed to put themselves utterly in the service of each composer, while retaining their powerful identity as an ensemble. And all with exquisite manners.

These remarkably gifted musicians are not complete strangers among us. Pianist Sarah Watkins is a popular member of the Music Academy faculty, and the trio hopes to make Santa Barbara a regular port of call. We should be so lucky.

The afternoon began with Debussy’s Trio in G Major, a charming, melodious work - every inch a late 19th-century piano trio, all but anonymous.

Then, as if John Cleese had come out and said, “And now for something completely different,” came two pieces from contemporary New Zealand. John Psathas’ Three Island Songs swept us up and swept us along at a breakneck pace (I wrote the word “driving” on my program, and later found out that “Driving” was the name of the first movement), while Victoria Kelly’s Piece for Violin, Cello, and Piano, after a sizable opening jolt, settled us down to a 10-minute meditation, in easy-to-digest musical terms, of certain ideas about dreams and reality. Different as the two pieces are, they share a freshness, a vitality, and a complete freedom from academic formulae. I look forward to hearing both again.

Shostakovich’s Piano Trio in E Minor, which closed the printed program, made for as an intense and harrowing a musical experience as I have had for some time. A tribute to all victims of fascism, it is also a memorial to Ivan Sollertinsky, who had just died in a Nazi camp when the piece was written. Sollertinsky was the man who introduced Shostakovich to, among other things, the music of Mahler, and took him to a 1927 performance of Berg’s Wozzeck. The New Zealanders’ commitment to this grimly beautiful and austerely passionate work was a wonder to behold and hear.

As an encore, the uncanny group played the tango Oblivion by Astor Piazzolla, thanking us for giving up the Super Bowl to come to their concert. Yet their playing is pure, and innocent of personal irony. Really fine.

Gerald Carpenter for The Independent, Santa Barbara, USA