REVERIE | Lingering on the question of form
AWE 2025 | Reverie
Friday 10 October, 7:30pm
Te Atamira, Queenstown
Our Friday night programme, Reverie, lingers on the question of form: how to honour it, how to resist it, and when to let it dissolve into something entirely new.
In the first piece of the evening, Piano Quintet No.1 ‘Clouds’, UK composer Eleanor Alberga looks skyward. Each movement of her quartet takes its cue from a cloud, shifting and reforming as if shaped by wind. The clarity is striking, lines pared back, momentum carried forward by lightness and inevitability. Clouds offers a different kind of minimalism, one that hovers and drifts, a reverie written in weather.
Stravinsky, by contrast, splinters form into fragments. His Three Pieces for String Quartet mock tradition, folk elements distorted into the grotesque, coaxing our unexpected sounds from familiar and traditional formations. Written just a year after The Rite of Spring, which famously caused a riot for its audacity and non-conformity, these miniatures bristle with parody, challenging the listener to hear the quartet anew and reconsider their own preconceptions.
This year’s Composer in Residence John Psathas invites us into a different dreamscape. Sleeper, a compact but effervescent work, was written for his long-time collaborator Michael Houstoun who, as our AWE 2025 Festival Artist pianist, will be performing the work. Using minimalist techniques, very different to those of Alberga, Psathas creates a work that sparkles with curiosity and playfulness, offering a miniature meditation where ideas glimmer and fade, like thoughts passing through half-sleep.
Beethoven’s String Quartet in c-sharp minor op.131 closes the programme with defiance of another kind. Seven movements unfold without pause, one idea morphing into the next, a structure at once daring and inevitable. Often described as one of the greatest achievements in Western music, the quartet demands extraordinary devotion from performers. It is a dream of unbroken continuity, shaped with relentless imagination.
With only one performance of Reverie and tickets selling fast, we’d recommend you book your place now!