Music / Phoenix Collective Quartet, All Saints, Ainslie, 20 September 20. Reviewed by GRAHAM McDONALD.

The Phoenix Collective Quartet would seem to have created its own audience in Canberra.

Most, if not all, of the classical music concerts your reviewer attends are attended almost entirely by old folks. The PCQ audience is much more of a mixed demographic, with a good proportion a generation or two younger, closer to the 40ish age of the musicians themselves.

This might well be something to do with quartet’s choice of repertoire as well as its more relaxed approach to performance, introducing the music and talking about it. There is the sense that the musicians and audience are a group of friends gathered together for an hour or so of music, with much of the performer/audience divide removed.

This concert was, in the most part, fairly mainstream classical music. The bulk of it was the first movement of an unfinished quartet by Franz Schubert from 1820 and Shostakovich’s Quartet No. 5 written in 1952. The Schubert alternated short lyrical melodies from the first violin with more edgy accompaniments from the other three to create intriguing contrasts.

This was followed by a leap into much more contemporary music with string arrangements of two songs from Icelandic “post-rock” band Sigur Ros in a medley with two works from Icelandic composer Olafur Arnalds. PCQ Director Dan Russell described this music as “ethereal Icelandic escapism” and it would seem to sit somewhere between minimalist art music and ambient. Lots of long, slow-shifting chords with snatches of melody and arpeggios hold it together. The two pieces from Arnalds (best known for the theme music of the TV series Broadchurch) were especially interesting.

The main work of the concert was the Shostakovich quartet. This is in three movements, which the ensemble played without a break.

This is music a long way from that of Schubert, yet in some ways quite similar, as dark gloomy sections burst into brief melodies and then faded out again. As we have come to expect from these four musicians the playing was flawless, the concert cleverly and thoughtfully programmed and your reviewer left feeling well satisfied, though I suspect one is not supposed to feel that way after Shostakovich.