Wilma Smith put together this group comprising two established musicians – Wilma herself and viola player Caroline Henbest, and two up-and-coming Kiwi musicians, cellist Alexandra Partridge and pianist Andrew Leathwick. Both Alexandra and Andrew have recently trained at the Australian National Academy of Music in Melbourne – a professional performance training institute offering post-grad study to exceptional young Australian and New Zealand classical musicians.
Wilma Smith and Friends Photo: WCMT
Wilma Smith (violin), Caroline Henbest (viola), Alexandra Partridge (cello), Andrew Leathwick (piano)
Brahms began sketching his third piano quartet during a very difficult time for him and his friends Robert and Clara Schumann. Robert had been confined in a mental asylum; Brahms did his best to provide moral support for Clara and her children, but his own emotions were extremely strained. In a letter to a friend at the time, he described the quartet’s first movement as a sort of musical corollary to the suicidal desperation of Goethe's Werther.
Brahms mapped out all three of his piano quartets when he was still in his twenties – but the third quartet took 20 years to complete.
When Brahms talked to his publisher Simrock about the finished quartet, he still used the image of a man contemplating suicide, saying the cover should show a picture of a head with a pistol to it. And he hinted that the Quartet could be taken as a musical illustration of Goethe’s novel Werther - whose protagonist shoots himself because of his anguish over a married woman whose husband he admires. The parallel with Brahms’s situation with the Schumanns is obvious.
Recorded 15 October 2017, St Andrew's on the Terrace, Wellington by RNZ Concert
Producer: David McCaw
Engineer: Graham Kennedy
