It’s a crying shame that Stroma plays only two concerts a year, because the amount of work done by both performers and composers for these concerts must be immense. This concert, part of New Zealand Music Month, featured two world premieres (McLeod and Downes), along with two New Zealand premieres (Whitehead and Norris). The main body of chamber musicians were joined by clarinettist Richard Haynes and the inestimable Richard Nunns playing taonga puoro.

Jenny McLeod’s return to chamber music with Cat Dreams was quite magnificent, using a from of evocative abstractionism that combined complex tonalities with a carefully crafted timbral blend. While clearly a programmatic rather than “pure” composition, no single aspect could be clearly traced back to its inspiration. Rather than presenting a direct image of a cat, McLeod portrays the “idea” of a cat, dissecting each aspect of this into something that can be revealed through gesture and structure rather than mere notes. Although there is little explicit continuity between the many movements of the piece, each proves vital in shaping its overall effect. The use of kouauau (played by Ross Harris) as a fully integrated part of the ensemble was particularly striking – Maori instruments rarely work as intended when placed squarely within a well-tempered environment – not only for its timbre (a hollow, breathy sound not dissimilar to a husky ocarina) but also for the manner in which it allowed McLeod to bend harmonies and melodies. One small criticism would be that several notes in the harp’s high register were either notated or played too loudly, resulting in an undesirably harsh attack.

It’s always a pleasure to see Richard Nunns and his leather jacket, even if he seems to get frailer with each performance, and his collaboration with Gillian Whitehead is undoubtedly one of New Zealand’s most fruitful musical partnerships. Whitehead’s genius in this area is in creating spaces for Nunns to fill, balancing intense atonal passages that rely heavily on the Western instruments with subdued, yet passionate sections featuring Nunns’ flutes and the karakias of Aroha Yates-Smith. Although the transitions could have bee jarring in the hands of a lesser composer, Whitehead navigated them wisely by associating the sounds of the taonga puoro in normal practise with extended techniques on the flutes to create vivid rattlings and shimmerings.

David Downes’ new work Bliss Mechanisms, which opened the second half of the program, was focussed musically around the interactions between clarinet and piano. The clarinet part in particular was geared towards perpetual motion, constantly churning through new pitch material. As such it possessed similarity to some of John Psathas’ early work, although with a much lesser sense of organic growth. The sonic world of the music was enhanced by two of the brass players blowing and twirling hosepipes to create shrieking noises at climactic points, but their presence did somewhat detract from the other players. No matter how well somebody can play the clarinet, they will never be able to compete for the audience’s attention against some guy waving a pipe around, so in some ways it might have been beneficial to record these parts for performance playback.

Michael Norris’ unpronounceable tesserae… interstices featured a clarinet part based around Luciano Berio’s Sequenza III, recomposed and texturally enveloped by a small ensemble. The clarinet recomposition roughly follows a noise continuum, as distinct tones gradually disappear in favour of breath-like techniques. The surrounding textures also seem to become more complex to complement this, although they are forced to be slightly muted to allow the soloist space. This composition is an exercise in pure music far more than anything else on the programme, but it possesses a great deal of aural beauty nonetheless, much of which must be credited to Richard Haynes’ skill in shaping the complex clarinet part.

John Rimmer’s The Ring of Fire, written in 1976, was the only piece concert more than two years old, and it received a brilliant performance by the ensemble in its largest incarnation of the night. The title obviously refers to the volcanoes around the Pacific Rim, and contains some truly explosive music led by brass and percussion, contrasted by idyllic, ‘dormant’ sections. The players are seated in a wide semicircle, so that in one particularly vivid passage the music is swept around the group. Stroma played this with a great degree of theatricality, although the closing segment in which Bridget Douglas rose and replaced the conductor at the front of the stage with her shrieking piccolo was perhaps a little overdone – Rimmer’s intention here was a lament, but the dynamics were a little forceful to carry this off.

[I have a couple of draft symphony things waiting around for me to finish them. So coming up at some point should be Brian “Gothic” and Nielsen “Die Vier Temperamenten”]