In the moment
Laura Williamson, editor of 1964: mountain culture / aotearoa, asks if At the World’s Edge can get us all hooked on classical.
I’ve seen chamber music described as “a delicate, but intense, world in miniature.”
I like that, because it not only sums up what this niche of classical music is, but what makes good art. Good art takes big stuff and serves it up small. It packages emotion and history and ideas and gets straight to it with a word, a brushstroke, a note. It’s shorthand.
The niche thing, Justine Cormack says, is especially true in Aotearoa New Zealand. Here, she explains, classical music is not especially mainstream, making chamber music “a niche of a niche”. Justine is Festival Director of the At the World’s Edge Festival (AKA the AWE Festival), a week-long chamber music festival that will see six intertwined programmes taking place from October 8 to 16 in Wānaka, Cromwell and Queenstown.
At the World’s Edge started when Justine, who was a founding member of the chamber ensemble NZTrio, met the London-based violinist Benjamin Baker through Queenstown’s Michael Hill International Violin competition. Turns out they both, independently, had had the thought that the Central Otago and the Southern Lakes would be an ideal setting for a chamber music festival. “We became aware through conversation that we both wanted to do something around Queenstown, so we met up to see if our ideas overlapped. It just started from there,” Justine, who lives near Wānaka, recalls.
Both Benjamin and Justine are massively accomplished musicians. Born in Aotearoa, Benjamin studied at the Royal College of Music, London. He won 1st Prize at the 2016 Young Concert Artists International Auditions in New York, has made solo recordings with the BBC Concert and Royal Philharmonic Orchestras and appeared with everyone from the Auckland Philharmonia to the London Mozart Players and the Symphony Orchestra Simón Bolívar of Venezuela. Justine, in turn, has had an illustrious career in New Zealand, including stints as 1st Violinist in the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra and Concertmaster of the Auckland Philharmonia. During her 15 years with NZTrio, the group commissioned almost 40 works, were awarded the Lilburn Trust Citation for Outstanding Services to New Zealand Music, and, while they were at it, were finalists, along with collaborators the Mike Nock Trio, for Best Jazz Album in the 2017 Jazz Awards.
After not quite getting off the ground in 2020 thanks to you-know-what, the festival launched in October 2021 with three concerts over a long weekend. It went well (“everyone loved it and musicians went away so inspired”, Justine says), and 2022 sees the AWE Festival return with double the number of performances and an expanded roster of events. Ten artists from New Zealand and abroad, among them the internationally-acclaimed Polish cellist Maciej Kułakowski, plus four young musicians selected for the festival’s Emerging Artist Pathway, will perform. There will also be a premiere of a new violin and cello duo by the festival’s Composer in Residence Gareth Farr, live shows for more than 2000 schoolkids, and a programme of free events including an art exhibition, open rehearsals, and composition workshops.
Sounds impressive, but what is chamber music exactly? According to Justine, who calls it “my real love”, it’s a form of classical music played by small groups of musicians, with each musician playing a different and distinct part. The most common number of members is three (hence the NZ Trio) or four, but there are sometimes up to eight in a group. Traditionally, chamber music was made to be performed in a home, or, say, a palace chamber, as opposed to somewhere big like a church. “It’s intimate and powerful and up close. You really experience the acoustic nature of the instruments,” Justine explains.
She tells me one of her fondest memories of NZTrio was touring Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time (Quatuor pour la fin du temps) in 2016, which is funny, because Messiaen was my gateway gig for chamber concerts. I saw NZTrio (now made up of Amalia Hall on violin, Ashley Brown on cello and pianist Somi Kim) and clarinettist Jonathan Cohen perform Quartet for the End of Time at the Nelson Centre of Musical Arts in the winter of 2021. It was in between lockdowns, during that time when we were starting to understand that everything we had hoped would be over was far from done.
I knew nothing about chamber music, and very little about classical in general – I’m more a Joy Division with a side of filthy eighties pop kind of person (Duran Duran 4EVA!). But there wasn’t much on that night, so I thought I’d give it a whirl. The work has an incredible backstory. In June of 1940, the French composer Olivier Messiaen was captured and imprisoned by the German Army in Stalag VIIIa at Görlitz, an overcrowded brutally cold camp in what is now Zgorzelec, Poland. There, he created what is now considered a chamber masterpiece, written for the specific instruments played by the musicians imprisoned with him at the time: the clarinettist Henri Akoka, cellist Étienne Pasquier and violinist Jean le Boulaire. Messiaen was on piano.
Quartet for the End of Time debuted on January 15, 1941 in front of an audience of about 400 prisoners and German officers. It blew me away. It was, at various points, gorgeous, unsettling, sad, hopeful and, I don’t know, it sort of got inside my chest and never left.
Which is to say, despite my previous based-on-nothing impression that chamber music was something that mostly involved formal clothing and the type of people who probably paid a lot of attention to the Queen’s Jubilee, I know exactly what Justine means when she describes it as an experience that leaves people “moved and transported. In the same way going into the mountains does.”
This leads us to why Justine and Ben felt the landscapes Queenstown and Central Otago were the ultimate backdrop for a chamber music showcase. According to Justine, “People who really enjoy chamber music are open minded and enjoy the thrill of a journey. There’s a real crossover with the adventure community.” She points out that the theme of the AWE Festival this year is “Solitude and Togetherness”, with the six programmes serving as “waypoints charting an exploration of the roles that solitude and togetherness play within the creative process.” Like a day in the hills, it’s a journey through a world in miniature, one best understood in person. “You’re seeing the creation of the sound, and of experiencing something that is passing. It puts you in the present. You are in the moment and then it’s gone.”
Read this article in print in the Spring issue of '1964: mountain culture / aotearoa', out now!