HORIZON | Tracing the delicate line between the natural and the human
AWE 2025 | Horizon
Sunday 12 October, 2pm & 5:30pm
Te Atamira, Queenstown
The 2025 AWE Festival is brought to a close with Horizon, a programme that traces the delicate line between the natural and the human: the music of birds, flowers, and light refracted through the imagination of composers at moments of both calm and crisis.
The programme begins with Hermit Thrush at Morn, op.92 for solo piano by Amy Beach, the American composer who found inspiration during a retreat in New Hampshire. She spoke of waking to the song of the thrush in the morning and hearing it again at night, changed by the hour. This natural cycle infuses her music with subtle shifts of colour and mood, a reminder of form born out of nature’s rhythms.
Debussy follows with one of his final works, Sonata for violin and piano, written during the dark years of World War I. Like Ravel, he was often associated with natural imagery (Monet’s water lilies come to mind), but here the gaze turns inward. This sonata is less about the world outside than about the human condition itself: proof of what a dying man could create while the world was unravelling around him. Compressed and intense, it forms the lynchpin of the programme’s first half, moving us from Beach’s natural reverie to Debussy’s existential defiance, and preparing the way for music that pushes the boundaries of form.
John Psathas, our Composer in Residence, leads us into the second half with Corybas, a trio inspired by the corybas flower, whose curved form echoes the helmet once worn by dancers in ancient Greece. Here, a natural shape becomes human ritual and expression, transformed into sound and movement, linking ancient forms with a contemporary imagination.
The evening culminates in George Enescu’s virtuosic Octet for Strings, composed in 1900 when he was just nineteen. Immediately hailed as innovative and ambitious, it remains one of the most challenging pieces of chamber music ever written! Enescu described the experience as like an engineer attempting his first bridge, unsure how to span the distance, yet compelled to attempt the impossible. Epic in scale and intensity, it pushes eight string players to their personal limits, a feat of invention and endurance matched by the extraordinary devotion of its performers. For this performance, AWE brings together a formidable line-up of string players, eight musicians tasked with the challenge of bringing Enescu’s youthful masterpiece to life as we bring this year’s festival to a close.