Ensemble Gô

In August of 2022, the Wellington Chamber Music Trust presented featuring the violin and marimba duo of Ensemble Gô.  The duo consists of Wellington’s talented young musicians, violinist Monique Lapins and percussionist Naoto Segawa.

Monique Lapins is a regular soloist and chamber musician around New Zealand, and is second violinist of the New Zealand String Quartet. Naoto Segawa is a percussionist with Orchestra Wellington and describes himself as a dedicated contemporary music percussionist.

Russian pianist and composer, Sergei Rachmaninov arranged three movements from J.S. Bach's Partita in E Major for solo violin for the piano, extracting hidden voices from the solo violin part implied by Bach’s sophisticated harmonies.  Naoto Segawa transcribed these arrangements for Ensemble Go to perform in this concert.

 

Danish composer Anders Koppel composed his Tarantella in 1996.  Koppel describes a story that inspired the work…he writes: A young girl is walking barefoot down the road outside the village of Taranto.  Suddenly she feels a pain in her toe.  She has been bitten by the tarantula…”

The tarentella is a frenzied dance supposedly brought on by the spider bite, but Anders’ dance is twisted and unpredictable, as you might expect after being bitten by a tarantula.

 

New Zealander Ross Harris composed 'Strings and Wood' specifically for Ensemble Go.  Here’s what he had to say about the duo:

 

“I was inspired to write this short piece for Monique and Naoto after hearing their Adam Festival performance in 2021.  In it I have attempted to bring the diverse sounds of string and wood together in a unified sound world.”

 

South African composer Peter Klatzow became an influential composer after becoming the Director of the College of Music at the University of Cape Town in 1973 after studying in Johannesburg and London.  His Sonata for Violin and Marimba was written in 2002 as a commission by Japanese marimba player, Kuihiko Komori who premiered it in Tokyo the same year.  In contrast to the music we just heard, this work aims to highlight the differences between the instruments, giving the melodies to the violin and the harmonic elaborations to the marimba.

Peter Klatzow passed away in 2021 from COVID-19, leaving behind a rich body of music.  His music has been performed by noted musicians from the King’s Singers to percussionist Evelyn Glennie, and has received awards in Spain, the UK and Canada.

 

Linda Dallimore is a composer, flutist and teacher based Auckland.  She describes her music as exploring textures, colours, and often drawing inspiration from personal experiences, the environment, and social and political topics. Dallimore won the inaugural Chamber Music New Zealand Commission Prize, and this 2022 work called ‘Matariki’ was the result.

Dallimore writes:

Matariki explores the unique role and significance of each star within a Maori understanding of cosmology as outlined by Rangi Matamua in the book Matariki.

The nine movements representing the Matariki stars are:

Waipunarangi: Water that pools in the sky

Hiwa-i-te-rangi - the promise of a prosperous season

Waita - the ocean and food within

Waiti - fresh water and its creatures

Pohutukawa - the pathway of spirits

Ururangi - the winds of the sky

Matariki - the heal and wellbeing of people and the Mother of the star cluster

Tupuanuku - to grow in the earth, the soil and harvest

Tupuarangi - food of the sky and the harvesting of birds, fruits and berries.

 

And from the stars and Aotearoa, we end up in a train station in Paris where the composer watched a modern day Romeo and Juliet parting ways.

Anders Koppel, the Danish composer whose Tarantella we heard earlier, was reminded of Shakespeare’s play while watching a parting couple at the Gare du Nord in Paris.

 

Dutch composer Jacob ter Vedlhuis, also known as  ‘JacobTV’, is an avant-garde composer who often uses samples of the human voice, but also says he ‘peppers his music with sugar’. 

In this case, he was watching a cheesy advertisement for a weight-loss product called the Abtronic Pro that uses an electronic slimming belt whose fine-tuned wave transmissions will vibrate fat away.

Originally written for piano and sampled audio, Monique Lapins and Naoto Segawa give us their version of “The Body of Your Dreams” by JacobTV.

 

Performed at St. Andrew's on the Terrace, Wellington 14 Aug 2022. Recorded by RNZ Concert.