Full steam ahead for the Aroha String Quartet

...The Aroha Quartet played [the Beethoven] with passion, with beautiful tone and meticulous clear phrasing...This was a memorable concert and the Aroha Quartet are one of the great musical assets of our city....
(Steven Sedley in Middle C)

The Aroha String Quartet are champions of new music and are always ready to try something new, but performing a world premiere in a steam railway museum was adventurous even by their standards! When the quartet was in Austria for the International Summer Academy last August they gave the first performance of a work especially written for them by the young Hungarian composer Peter Tornyai. The single movement string quintet takes its inspiration from Schubert's remarkable Quintet in C but while it contains quotations from Schubert, its extensive use of scordatura (retuning) and harmonics creates a very different sound world, with fascinating, earcatching textures and sonorities.

The first performance of the quintet was held on a railway platform amongst steam engines in the Sudbahnmuseum train museum. Listen out for the first New Zealand performances of the work in 2012.