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Canberra Today 15°/17° | Thursday, March 28, 2024 | Digital Edition | Crossword & Sudoku

Ensemble’s confident, charming performance

Barbara Jane Gilby and Pip Thomson. Photo: Peter Hislop

Canberra Strings, Wesley Uniting Church, Forrest, July 25. Reviewed by CLINTON WHITE.

In its few short years, Canberra Strings, formed and led by violinist Barbara Jane Gilby, has established itself as an important ensemble in Canberra’s music landscape.

As well as performing a season of concerts each year, the ensemble, in its various configurations, collaborates with other groups and recently completed a recording of a new work by Canberra composer, Sally Greenaway.

This concert featured two works by Russian composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky.

First was his “String Quartet Movement in B-flat”, written in 1865, when Tchaikovsky was 25. Debate would have it that it was part of his first attempt at writing a string quartet, with its theme based on a tune he heard gardeners singing. There is also debate over whether other movements were written and destroyed or whether the work remained unfinished during Tchaikovsky’s lifetime. This surviving piece was not published until 1940.

It has two sections, the first marked adagio misterioso (slow and mysterious), and then morphing rather cleverly, through a series of short solos on each of the instruments, into allegro con moto (lively with motion).

The quartet of the Canberra Strings was Barbara Jane Gilby and Pip Thompson (violins), Lucy Carrigy-Ryan (viola) and Samuel Payne (cello).

Canberra Strings. Photo: Peter Hislop.

There was excellent cohesion and communication across the ensemble throughout the work. Although the slow section sounded a little stiff, losing some lyricism and fluidity with a very strict tempo, the allegro saw the players settling into their performance and starting to have fun.

Violist, Jack Chenoweth, and cellist, Julia Janiszewski, joined the quartet for the second work, the “String Sextet in D-minor” Op.70, subtitled “Souvenir de Florence”.

Written when Tchaikovsky was 50 years old, “Souvenir” is his only string sextet and carries a theme that the composer sketched when he visited Florence, Italy.

It is a beguiling work, especially with its dancing first movement, and, paradoxically for the work’s subtitle, Russian folk-dance styles in the final movement. Also in the fourth movement, there is a delightful melody that could very well become a salon song. In the second movement there is a nice exchange between the first violin and first cello, supported by pizzicato on the other strings. Some lively, beautifully executed, single-note pizzicatos running around the instruments had the eyes running back and forth across the ensemble.

A lot was happening in the ensemble during this piece and the players handled it all brilliantly and confidently to create a most charming performance, and one that showed just how much we Canberrans should value Canberra Strings.

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