Music / Alma Moodie Quartet and Edward Neeman. At Wesley Music Centre, October 4. Reviewed by GRAHAM McDONALD.

This was an engaging concert from the Alma Moodie String Quartet in collaboration with pianist Edward Neeman.

It was a varied repertoire, including a baroque-inspired Prelude by Australian composer Margaret Sutherland, a Bach Partita (both from Neeman), a Haydn string quartet and an early piano quintet by Erich Korngold, better known for his film scores.

Sutherland’s Chorale Prelude on Jesu, meine Freude opened the concert. This is a quiet, reflective work, with hints of its baroque origins throughout. This was a gentle way to start the concert and a noted contrast to the JS Bach Partita No 5 in G major that followed immediately at a cracking pace. Neeman surged through this work with a supremely confident fluidity and impressively without the safety net of any written music. The audience responded suitably.

This was followed the quartet playing Joseph Haydn’s Emperor Quartet in C major, Op76, No 3. Everything just clicked together for the ensemble from the opening bars. They were tight, confident and precise throughout the dynamics were effective and they looked like they were enjoying themselves. Violist James Wannan especially kept watching the others and nodding cues and encouragement. Quite simply, as good a Haydn quartet as this reviewer has heard.

After an interval, Neeman joined the quartet for Erich Korngold’s Piano Quintet in E major, Op 15. This was written around 1922, when Korngold was in his mid-20s and composing music for opera and theatre productions. This is a very busy work in three movements. The strings use lots of effects – harmonics, mutes, pizzicato – throughout while the piano adds chords and arpeggios to create a constantly changing soundscape. For all that it was written in the silent movie era, it constantly reminded the listener of dramatic scenes in a 1930s Hollywood feature. Violinist Kristian Winther, in his spoken introduction to the work, noted that a theme in the final movement later appeared in an Errol Flynn swashbuckler.

This is an interesting and complex work, perhaps too self-consciously dramatic, but very well played by the quintet. It brought the quartet back to their stated core repertoire of European music from between the wars, which was Alma Moodie’s era. Each concert sees this ensemble getting tighter and more adventurous. We can only look forward to what they do next.