INTIMATE VOICES | AWE launches in Wānaka
AWE 2025 | Intimate Voices
Saturday 4 Oct, 4 & 7:30pm
Rippon Hall, Wānaka
The 2025 At the World’s Edge Festival begins in Wānaka in Rippon Hall, a striking setting for our first programme, Intimate Voices, which features three very different but deeply personal works for string quartet.
We begin with Mozart, whose String Quartet No.17 in B-Flat Major, K.458, The Hunt opens with a call that recalls the hunt, but quickly moves beyond that. This is music written for the sheer joy of it, full of energy and invention. Mozart was one of the most widely travelled composers of his time, and this piece captures that outward-looking spirit.
Next is a work by this year’s Composer in Residence, John Psathas, A Cool Wind. This is a wonderful piece with which to introduce John’s canon of work that will be performed throughout the festival, a work that gives a strong sense of his musical language. John has described this A Cool Wine as a “musical supplication”, a plea for soothing balm amid anguish. The intertwining inner lines of the quartet mimic that human‑voice quality, with overlapping melodies that evoke a cool breath across emotional terrain.
Finally, we turn to Sibelius, with one of his lesser-known but most concentrated works: the string quartet Voces Intimae. Sibelius was deeply inspired by his homeland, and this piece is a powerful musical expression of Finland itself; the textures, the melodies, and the atmosphere are all steeped in that landscape. It’s an inward-looking and intensely intimate work.
The free AWE+ strand of this programme sits between the two performances of Intimate Voices and brings together our ROSL scholars and festival artists James Bush (cello) and Erin Helyard (harpsichord), with a focus on early music and the baroque.
This programme includes one of the oldest surviving pieces of Western music, a canon by Guillaume de Machaut that forms a perfect musical palindrome, readable from either direction!
There’s also music by Charles Avison, a composer influenced directly by the artist William Hogarth. Avison was both a creator and a thinker. He wrote about how music connects with visual art, and then composed pieces from those ideas. Not much of his music survives today, so this is a rare chance to hear his voice.
We also feature a chaconne by Antonio Caldara, an Italian composer whose work sits at the core of early baroque music. Built on a repeating harmonic structure, the chaconne is one of music’s most enduring forms; there’s a sense of inevitability to it, of comfort even, especially when those patterns are subtly subverted. It's a form that speaks to the deep emotional pull of returning themes.