Post-concert euphoria
Virtuoso Strings Septet in concert
Triple Shot - Liam Whatman, Hamish Harrison, Miles Lim with tutor Nicole Chao
SyncopaFour - Amelia Liu, Olivia Zhou, Annika Bonk and Mietta Lin with tutor Beth Chen
Shared meals brought groups and families together
Triple Shot in concert
8 June 2025
Thoughts on the Secondary Schools Chamber Music Competition
This weekend I was listening to the first Wellington round of the chamber music competition.
Miraculously, this is the 60th year of this national competition, making it by far the longest running national chamber music competition for secondary school aged players in the world. So it’s definitely been a fixture in my life since moving to New Zealand in 1994.
My own high school student competition experiences were limited to jazz band competitions. Of course those were super fun, especially when I got to put aside my baritone saxophone and take an electric violin solo! And they’d given me a taste for the kind of motivation, and group cohesion, that the electric atmosphere of a competition provides. We were inspired by groups from other towns, got ideas from them, met like minded musicians - it was all great.
But now, here, I was introduced to a competition open to any small group of players, performing music of all styles, old and new, without conductor of course, which motivated players around the country for months on end each year.
Once the NZSQ’s Adam Summer School, which we founded in 1995, was up and running, I began dreaming of a smaller version of the intensity that we offered there for secondary school students preparing for the competition. Finally, in 2014, I was able to get the Queen’s Birthday Chamber Music Weekend off the ground, with the support of my NZSQ colleagues and the NZSM.
Now that I’m no longer at Victoria University, the weekend is rebranded the Chamber Music Mega Weekend and run in conjunction with the Pettman National Academy. This year it was held at Wellington High School and Queen Margaret College. 12 groups attended and we had a wonderful group of coaches, including 3 former NZSQ members, Rolf Gjelsten, Monique Lapins, and myself, the Duo Enharmonics piano duo of Beth Chen and Nicole Chao, NZSO members Bridget Douglas and Alan Molina, violinist Lynley Culliford and pianist Richard Mapp.
It had a wonderful vibe, everyone improved massively and had a great time and the feedback has been awesome. All that wouldn’t have nearly the benefit for the students if there wasn’t the competition to set the framework for it all.
Listening to the groups in the first round, I was thinking back to those that I’d worked with over the months - having more time I’d done more preparatory coaching than in other years - and thinking about the massive amount of learning that’s gone on for each player. The skills they are learning in this process are musical skills and life skills in equal measure and they accumulate every year for each player.
They learn to trust themselves and each other. They learn to communicate through sound and gesture, “reading the room” of their group to sense where everyone is at at any given moment. They learn to listen and respond to others while they are themselves playing. They are exposed to new styles of music and notation they may not have experienced before. They learn to ask the “what is the meaning or the story here?” question about every movement, bar, phrase, dynamic change, and articulation marking. They learn to express themselves through music originating from other people’s experiences - a lesson in empathy. They get input from a variety of teachers, including for some of them in the hothouse atmosphere of the chamber weekend. And they have performed repeatedly in the lead up to today - some of the lucky ones will get more performances in the course of the competition as well. There’s nothing like getting up in front of others and sharing the fruits of your musical labours to cement the learning that’s gone on. Each performance shows you what you know, and what you still need to work on. And ALL OF THIS is IRL, not mediated through screens, edited or digitalised. Real music shared in real time with real people. What a gift.
What a special opportunity for these young musicians. I think this competition is truly a taonga of New Zealand and I believe it has shaped the musical values of this country beyond measure.
The Mühlfeld Trio: Jonah Liu, William Ding and Sebastian Green with tutor Rolf Gjelsten
Olivia Zhou, Edmund Green and Claire Zhong “Bonis et Edclairvia” - with tutor Helene Pohl
Bonis et Edclairvia with flute tutor Bridget Douglas
“SCRAM!” - Ambrose Tarrant-Matthews, Catherine Harrison, Millianne Lim and Reilly Blennerhassett in concert
“Blühend” - sisters Juliana, Roseanna and Helena Burgstaller in master class with Richard Mapp and Helene Pohl
DETAILS, DETAILS…. Thoughts after our concert May 3.
In this concert we featured two extraordinary young violinists, 10-year-old An Pham and 12-year-old Hamish Harrison, performing some duos by Béla Bartók. Bartók’s set of 44 violin duets are truly great music in miniature, an ideal tool for learning both chamber music skills as well the language of one of the most iconic and influential 20th century composers. Playing these pieces was an important part of my childhood chamber music journey, and I still love playing and coaching them. I spent quite a bit of time in our pre-concert coachings with An and Hamish discussing the meaning and importance of (the copious) individual markings in the score - dynamic, tempo, and articulation. Suddenly it struck me that Bartók would feel like ancient music to these children of the 21st century. After all, he died 80 years ago! However, in my early years with the NZSQ, before recording the Bartók quartet cycle, we had many hours of coachings from violinist Zoltán Székely, who not only knew Bartók, but performed with him for many years, was the dedicatee of the 2nd Violin Rhapsody (and was the arranger of Bartók’s Rumanian Folk Dances, an obligatory rite of passage for most young violinists). So, for me to be able to tell these young musicians that they were only two degrees of separation from the great composer felt quite momentous! It brought back the memories of all those coachings with Székely, where he continually highlighted the nitty-gritty compositional elements in the score, brought to life within the context of traditional Hungarian musical practices. Later I was thinking about a coaching we had on Bartók’s 6th quartet with Eugene Lehner, who as violist of the pre-WW2 Kolisch Quartet also played for Bartók many times. His teaching focus in this brilliant and detailed work was purely expressive and emotional. This didn’t mean we didn’t still give importance to each marking in the score - it just emphasised that the interpretation of music doesn’t end there.
These are all precious memories that are a privilege to pass on. And having started this train of thought, I know there will be more to share…
So what’s the upshot for us as musicians? Each marking needs to be taken seriously, questioned, and reverse-engineered as much as possible to tease out why it may have been written by the composer, as well as its meaning renewed for us, today, taking in our philosophical framework and understanding of each musical composition, which includes all of our experience of the composer’s music, other music of the era, and influences that composer would have had. A never ending quest for ever more powerful expression, one dot at a time.
April 2025
L to R: Helene Pohl, Monique Lapins, Rolf Gjelsten, Chris van der Zee at the March 22 Comfy Concert. Chris, we are proud to say, was also a student of ours back in the day. Being an outstanding violist doesn’t seem to be enough for him - he now is one of the busiest guys in Wellington, teaching math to secondary students by day, conducting a youth orchestra at the weekends, and in the evenings frequently performing with the NZ Symphony Orchestra. Not to mention his 3 kids! Respect!
Musings on Musical Performance, Tradition and Family
The Comfy Concerts series of benefit concerts kicked off with a wonderful experience for players and audience alike on March 22,
(those who wish, may read all about it! Review)
and now we are in rehearsal for the next one, which will take place on April 19. Our guest artists this time are three wonderful members of the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra whom we’ve known since they were teenagers, who all got their first university degrees from Victoria University, studying both their solo instrument and lots of chamber music with us/the NZSQ, both at the University and at the Adam Chamber Music Summer School. Anna van der Zee was NZSQ second violin Douglas Beilman’s student and then returned to take part in the Graduate Quartet programme (Tasman Quartet); Nicholas Hancox learned with NZSQ violist Gillian Ansell and was in a Graduate Quartet as well (Antipodes Quartet), and Julia Joyce learned with me, later switching to viola when she studied in London. She was also a member of a string quartet (Puertas Quartet) which did some New Zealand tours a few years back.
Playing with these experienced, highly communicative and deeply intelligent artists is a revelation - I suppose akin to the obvious discovery that one’s child has grown up and become an equal adult, with whom one shares a common language and much history. It’s made me think about what makes us comfortable with people, and what it means to pass along a musical tradition. Learning an instrument and the complexity of chamber music playing is a long and multi-layered journey, and finding players with whom one shares expectations, sonic sensitivity and stylistic awareness is very special. It’s truly a feeling of family.
We are all a complex mixture of genetics, experience, and influences, and it brings up the question about where do our deepest musical values come from - In my case, a mixture of all the teachers I had in my life, from my first Suzuki experiences to the various teaches and coaches in my teens and twenties, culminating in the three decades of intense quartet work with my “three teachers” (as I liked to describe my colleagues) - in each case each of these interactions included influences they had all grown up with as well. How far does this all go back? My first teacher liked to tell me he was a teacher/student descendant of Joseph Joachim - others went back to Ysaÿe and de Bériot. Added to this it’s also becoming clear to me how much I learned from the wonderful students we were privileged to work with, and how that learning now continues as we work together as colleagues. It’s additionally interesting to think about what are the values that transcend the styles of the day - as we can hear from 100 year old recordings, in some ways we play very differently than did our forebears.
So what are these deepest musical values? Powerful communicative collaboration as a way of creating a whole greater than the sum, and as a way to convey the hopeful news that we human beings can indeed create beauty and meaning together. Staying open to ideas by others keeps us growing, and speaking through our instruments allows us to transcend the limitations of words. In all this we are inspired by the great art gifted to us by composers of the past as well as the present, from countries around the world and from right here. In a world so marked by conflict and zero-sum thinking, this is indeed an important message.
I’m also again marvelling at the fate that brought me into this field, where the deep connections we forge with our mentors, students and colleagues are rare and valuable. This is a world where we are all family who work together to bring great art to life - indeed a beautiful calling.
PS - it’s very apt that the charity that the proceeds of the concert go to is Arohanui Strings+, which as part of the Sistema movement teaches music for free to all comers with a policy of Radical Inclusion - making the joy of music accessible to all. I cherish my involvement with this visionary organisation. More on that another time.
Helene Pohl
January 2025
One of my favourite memories of a performance in a school was in a small town in the South Island a number of years ago. We were doing a game where student volunteers come to the front of the stage and hold hand-drawn posters depicting emotions, which they are to lift up when the music reminds them of the feeling in the drawing. A boy, perhaps 9 years old, with a beanie on and some sort of attitude that we couldn’t quite read put up his hand and came up front. Every time he lifted his poster to match the character of the music, his classmates all roared with approval. After the concert, we saw his teacher at the back, visibly moved. She told us this boy had never once put his hand up for anything in school, that this was the very first time. Hearing our music made him want to join in, and all the other kids were showing their support. It was a beautiful reminder of the power of music to reach kids that might lack confidence in other ways - and of the warmth that kids can show each other.
August 2024
In June of this year a beloved relative of mine died quite young and quite tragically of cancer, having only recently retired and looking forward to many more enjoyable years with his wife and family. His funeral happened to be between two concerts we had on our Canadian tour so Rolf and I didn’t think twice about making the trip to Germany to be there. We played at the funeral, and by his wife's request I brought my violin along to the cemetery after the service. It started to rain, but other relatives stepped up with big umbrellas to shield the violin. I began by playing the hymn from the service while family members each said their own goodbyes, stepping up to sprinkle earth and flower petals on the grave, and then I noticed that more and more mourners were coming to pay their own last respects, so I repeated the hymn a few times. As more and more people joined the line, I began to improvise on the hymn, then I couldn’t very well play for them but not for the next ones, so I just continued improvising… some a bit Irish, then a bit of Bach Chaconne, then the hymn again, then lots more that I don’t specifically remember. In the end I played non stop for about 30-40 minutes. The experience was unlike any performance I’ve ever given - not a performance as such, but rather a framing of the situation, a wish to express all the feelings that we were sharing, of loss, grieving, but also consolation, a moving of a relationship to another plane. My mind was at once quite full ("where am I in the phrase?” "Should I modulate now?" type things) and empty, just feeling with everyone, letting the music come out of my violin.
In this era of ubiquitous music, with everyone having access to all types of music in their pocket-computer, it was powerful to feel the shared nature of the experience, and that this is indeed why wordless music exists - to say things words cannot, and to bring us together in our shared humanity. It was a privilege to be the vehicle of this communication.
I hope to take this feeling into all of my concerts - particularly in some of the most spiritual moments in the music, to lift the musicians as well as our listeners up from whatever our current concerns are. Of course it’s delicious to know that our music speaks from a variety of vantage points - playful, dramatic, loving, dance-like, teasing, serious, and many more. But for those deep places in our soul, I’ll never forget what this experience taught me.