The Amici Ensemble Provide A Master Class In Françaix, Fauré, & Brahms

Wednesday, 28 May 2025, 8:08 am
Article: howard davis

Formed in 1988, the Amici Ensemble has been part of Aotearoa’s classical music scene for over thirty-five years. Now under the magisterial leadership of NZSO Associate Concertmaster Donald Armstrong, its membership changes each year depending on the works being performed. Previously Principal Second Violin of the Denmark’s Tivoli Sinfoniorkester, Concertmaster of the French Orchestre Philharmonique de Nice, and Music Director of the New Zealand Chamber Orchestra, Armstrong plays a 1754 Nicolò Gagliano violin.

This year the Ensemble includes Monique Lapins, Second Violinist of the NZ String Quartet and a Lecturer at Victoria University’s School of Music. She tours with the Ghost Piano Trio, performs regularly with leading orchestras and her delightful 2024 album, Notes From a Journey II, won Best Classical Artist at the Aotearoa Music Awards. Lapins played viola in this concert.

Robert Ibell played cello in the NZSO from 1993 to 2019 and now teaches and performs widely across Aotearoa, also collaborating in the Aroha Quartet, the Papaioea Piano Trio, and Hammers & Horsehair. A Yale DMA graduate, Jian Liu is an internationally acclaimed pianist, chamber musician, and educator. He has performed at New York’s Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center, and has recorded extensively. He is currently Programme Director of Classical Performance and Head of Piano Studies at Victoria University’s School of Music.

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Last Sunday at St Andrew’s, this formidable combination of top-flight musicians provided a master class in filigree technique with the three challenging chamber pieces. Aided and abetted by the intimate acoustics, their attentive and appreciative audience were treated to a superb recital tinged with virtuoso elements of stunning colouration and dynamic shading. It’s a struggle to find sufficient superlatives to describe their performance.

Full Disclosure: The following detailed analysis is intended largely for the edification of amateurs, students, and musical pedants. Others should probably skim or omit it entirely. It is indebted to Armstrong’s insightful program notes, from which it was drawn, adapted, and expanded, with the invaluable assistance of Wikipedia.

Working in reverse chronological order, the proceedings began with an effervescent rendition of Jean Françaix’s String Trio. Françaix (1912-97) was a French neoclassical composer whose prolific output and vibrant style was at home in a wide variety of genres. Since he was also a virtuoso pianist, many of his most enduring scores consist of chamber pieces for piano. Maurice Ravel told the young musician’s parents, "Among the child's gifts I observe above all the most fruitful an artist can possess, that of curiosity: you must not stifle these precious gifts now or ever, or risk letting this young sensibility wither.” Fortunately, they did not.

Françaix went on to compose over two hundred pieces for nearly every orchestral instrument, including the saxophone. His arrangements are distinguished not only by their lightness and wit, but also by a conversational interplay between musical lines that changed little throughout his long career. Inspired by Stravinsky, Ravel, and Poulenc, he integrated their influence into his own extensive aesthetic palette of tone colours, while remaining an avowed neoclassicist who drew from literature for many of his vocal settings, rejected atonality and formless wanderings, and wrote ten movie scores for film director Sacha Guitry.

Written in 1933 when he was just twenty-one, his String Trio sparkles with playful and elegant restraint, infusing classical forms with a distinctly modern sense of humour and rhythmic vitality. Armstrong’s describes the opening Presto as a “quicksilver movement that danced through shifting textures.” Françaix’s interplay between the instruments was reminiscent of a lively café conversation - witty and mischievous, yet always graceful. The central Scherzo is puckish and ironic, its off-kilter rhythms and whimsical melodic lines highlighting his talent for inverting traditional dance forms and creating an irresistible atmosphere of charming surprise. The final Andante Rondo - Vivo, as rendered by the Ensemble, certainly went off with a burst of fizzing, frothy energy.

Though not as frequently performed as his wind works, the String Trio displayed Françaix’ exceptionally mature degree of melodic invention. Although it demands huge technical skill, its distinctively French neoclassical accent is impeccably bright, intricately clever, and gracefully crafted. Françaix himself commented, “I am always told that my works are easy. Whoever says that has probably not played them.” Nevertheless, the Amici Ensemble’s vivacious rendition made it seem almost effortless.

Gabriel Fauré (1845-1924) was a transitional figure in modern French music, spanning Romanticism to the kind of Fauvist colourations much favoured in the early twentieth century. Composed in 1885-86, his Piano Quartet No. 2 in G minor displays not only the elegance of Impressionism, but also Fauré’s own refined musical language and poetic inspiration. Written during a time of personal turmoil that included a broken engagement and increasing deafness, yet at the height of his lyrical powers, his second Piano Quartet has a rich emotional depth that ranges from restless yearning to radiant beauty.

Following the German Romantic influence of Schumann’s and Brahms’ Piano Quartets, Fauré became intrigued by the possibilities of a piano quartet in the classical four-movement structure - an opening Allegro, followed by a Scherzo, a slow movement, and the Finale. Jean-Michel Nectoux proposed that Fauré’s adoption of this unusual form demonstrated not only a desire to break new ground, but also a commercial motivation because the classical repertory contained so few top-flight piano quartets (with the exception of those composed by Mozart). A work of great emotional complexity, subtle beauty, and refined craftsmanship, it premiered in January 1887. I and remains one of Fauré’s finest achievements in chamber music.

The first movement, Allegro molto moderato, is in classical sonata form and opens with a unison string melody accompanied by relentless piano figuration, providing a sweeping theme that sets a high level of emotional intensity. Fauré’s distinctive harmonic language infuses the music with a sense of longing and movement with the piano weaving in and out of the strings’ lyrical lines, creating an intimate, molto tranquillamente texture. The fleet-footed Scherzo in C minor is the shortest of the four movements and provides a delightful contrast. As Armstrong observed, its mellifluous piano runs and quicksilver strings contain a shadow of melancholy that lingers just below the surface, showcasing Fauré’s preternatural gift for balancing delicacy with rhythmic energy. It assumes a rapid 6/8 metre with a syncopated piano theme, as melodic material from the first movement is transformed into a rondo. Cross-rhythms of 3/4 in a broad string melody give way to another smooth theme which constitutes a sort of interlude, although the perpetuum mobile of the main Scherzo material continues behind it and gently carries the movement to its conclusion.

Fauré’s delicate unfolding of one of his most poignant slow movements, the Adagio non troppo, provides the emotional fulcrum of the piece. A simple, hymn-like theme in the strings evokes a reflective tenderness in E-flat major. Fauré described the gentle undulating piano figure with which it opens as "a vague reverie,” inspired by the memory of evening church bells in the village of Cadirac near his childhood home. The viola solo that follows is a rhythmically modified version of the second subject from the first movement, transformed into a gently oscillating siciliano. At the start of the middle section, the bell figure is played on the strings in a mixture of arco and pizzicato as the movement slowly builds to a fortissimo climax before it returns, guiding the music back to pastoral quiet. This bell theme returns again in the coda, fleshed out by the elaborate piano accompaniment to a cello melody, before the piece ends quietly in the home key of E flat major. Nectoux suggested that "The sense of space it creates, rapt and profound within a narrow range of notes, marks it out as being truly the music of silence.”

The Allegro molto Finale returned to the dramatic intensity of the opening section’s driving rhythms and sweeping melodies, with moments of lush lyricism and grace tempering the storm, and leading to a resolute conclusion. The movement sets off in fast triple time, with an insistent rising string melody together with piano triplets. The second subject, derived from the molto tranquillamente theme of the first movement, is a vigorous waltz-like theme succeeded by a melody for viola and cello that relates to the trio section of the Scherzo. Critic Stephen Johnson observed, "Passion and violence are again let loose … The relentless forward drive of this movement is quite unlike anything else in Fauré.”

In his biography of Fauré, musicologist Robert Orledge remarked that the Second Piano Quartet "announces his full artistic maturity” and “marks a significant advance on the First Quartet in the force of its expression, the greater rhythmic drive and complexity of its themes, and its deliberately unified conception.” Nectoux found the second theme "rather on the heavy side" and a later section "unusually for Fauré, lacking in imagination,“ while Aaron Copland thought it showed the composer "less carefree, less happy, more serious, more profound" than before. For Copland, the Adagio was "the crowning movement of the quartet … a long sigh of infinite tenderness, a long moment of quiet melancholy and nostalgic charm. Its beauty is a truly classic one if we define classicism as 'intensity on a background of calm'."

Joannes Brahms (1833-97) began composing his Piano Quartet No. 3 in C minor during a strained and unrequited romantic liaison with Clara Schumann, whose brother Robert was struggling with mental illness. Revising and completing it almost twenty-years later in 1875, the music possesses profound emotional depth and richness, earning its nickname the Werther Quartet in referrence to Goethe’s tormented and lovesick hero. Sending the completed work to his publisher, Brahms wrote, “You may place a picture on the title page, namely a head - with a pistol in front of it. This will give you some idea of the music.”

It’s now regarded as one of his most profound chamber music statements, infused not only with a profound sense of longing and despair, but also defiant resilience as it seemingly transmutes darkness into light. Its structure is both fascinating and extremely complex. The first movement, Allegro non troppo, is in C minor in triple meter, opening with a dark, restless theme in which the interplay between piano and strings demonstrates Brahms’ complete mastery of variation and development as he explores the movement’s emotional extremes.

Beginning with the piano playing bare octaves on C, the violin, viola, and cello then cover the first theme, consisting of two ‘sighing’ gestures of a descending minor second, followed by a descending theme. Some have speculated that this ‘sighing’ motif is a musical utterance of the name ‘Clara.’ More obvious is Brahms' transposed version of Schumann's ‘Clara Theme,’ first detected by Eric Sams - “The first sentence of that autobiographical work is doubly expressive of Clara. Furthermore, there is direct evidence that this melodic form actually embodied her, for Brahms as for Schumann.”

The opening section ends on a dominant pedal on G, with the violin and viola playing pizzicato octaves that turn the key to E minor., with chromatic descent employed to bring the music to a half-cadence on D and leading to the second theme in G major. The second movement consists of a short, tempestuous C minor Scherzo in compound duple meter that bursts forth with ferociously jagged rhythms, sharp accents, and pulsating energy, in contrast to the fragile Allegro Andante, where a serene cello melody offers some respite from the sonic assault. This gently lyrical movement reflects Brahms’ lingering affection for Clara, a brief glimpse of warmth and calm amid the Quartet’s otherwise overcast environment. Donald Francis Tovey argued that Brahms used the same key as the first movement because the latter did not sufficiently stabilise its own tonic and needed the second movement to furnish “the tonal balance unprovided for by the end of the first movement."

The third movement, marked Andante, is in a modified ternary form, beginning with a luscious cello melody played in its upper register with only the piano providing accompaniment that was inspired by Schumann's Piano Quartet. In a gesture Brahms frequently employed, the opening thematic material of this melody is a sequence of descending thirds. The coda explores the remote key of E major, introduced by a new chord progression in the first tutti idea and a solo cello line, and concluding with a pianissimo affirmation of the tonic.

The Finale: Allegro comodo in C minor is in cut time with a secondary subject in E flat major and returns to the quartet’s brooding core, revisiting earlier themes with renewed intensity and culminating in a cathartic, yet ambiguous ending. Brahms incorporates multiple levels of reference and quotation, with the piano accompaniment for the first theme derived from the opening piano line of Mendelssohn's Piano Trio in C Minor, which also features a quotation of a chorale melody taken from a sixteenth-century Genevan psalter.

Vincent C. K. Cheung observed that the opening G-E flat transition in the violin, coupled with the piano part, refers to the ‘Fate Theme’ in Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. Austrian musicologist Karl Geiringer thought Brahms had "for once overshot the mark,” pointing out that the next section is inserted "in order to mitigate the excessive conciseness of this movement,” and that later insertions were atypical of Brahms because of his "striving after compression.”

The coda opens with the piano loudly declaring the homo-rhythmic theme alternating with the strings and eventually subsiding into a tranquillo section in which the inversion of the violin theme first stated in the exposition is sequenced across all strings, while the piano continues to develop its initial theme. The violin theme begins in C major, but soon shifts back to C minor as the four-note idea from the development section returns, this time with its first note removed.

The violin and cello eventually manage to sustain the tonic C, while the piano and viola lean toward the tonic major. All instruments continue to die down as the piano plays one last descending chromatic scale, while the violin and viola combine the piano's initial theme with the quarter note rhythm and the cello sustains a low C. As the piano and strings reach their final notes, a pianissimo C major chord is held briefly, as though shining out of the mist. Two loud and abrupt C major chords complete the Quartet with a resounding flourish that suggests a both a mature acceptance of loss and a sense of triumphant resolution.

Wellington Chamber Music was formed in 1945 and has been presenting Sunday Concerts since 1982. The concerts feature top NZ artists and most concerts are recorded by RNZ Concert for later broadcast, often in the 1-3 pm slot on RNZ Concert. Ticket prices are modest as the organisers are unpaid volunteers, though the artists receive professional fees.

Next Concert: John Chen (piano), Sunday 15 June.

Francis Poulenc Three Novelettes; Henri Duparc Four Melodies; César Franck Prelude Chorale and Fugue; Gabriel Fauré Theme and Variations Op 73; Camille Saint-Saëns 6 Etudes Op 111.

For more information see www.sundayconcerts.org.nz or Eventfinda for bookings.

Tickets are $40 or $10 for those under 26, while school students are free if accompanied by an adult.

Howard Davis

Scoop Arts Editor

Educated at Cambridge and UCLA; worked on several major Hollywood feature films and as a Kundalini Yoga instructor in Los Angeles; currently enjoying life in Wellington.