Music / Phoenix Collective. Wesley Music Centre. August 15. Reviewed by ALANNA MACLEAN.

The Phoenix Collective swept into Wesley Music Centre for a night of exhilarating music that definitely left an absorbed audience wanting more. 

They were relaxed, dressed in orchestra blacks that formalised them, but the two violinists, Dan Russell (artistic director) and Pip Thomson, were happy to talk to the audience about what it was the quartet was about to play. Ella Brinch on the viola and Andrew Wilson on the cello were content to let the music speak for them and very impressive it all was, too.

The music whizzed along on computer tablets on the music stands and the whole program was done in a superb hour and a half.

The collective opened with Boccherini’s String Quartet No 47 in G Minor No 5 and what a lush treatment this reassuring and confident music was given.

Then followed Verdi’s lone string quartet (No 1 in E minor 1873). Not a voice nor a murderous plot to be found, but a gorgeous sense of a Verdi opera trying to escape. We will never know the plot of this one.

An audience member even asked spontaneously and enthusiastically at the end of the Verdi, “Can you play it again?” They didn’t, because there was still one more piece to come in a tight program, but there was a lot of appreciative laughter that washed over into the challenging last piece.

Giovanni Sollima is a still living composer and the three sections of Viaggio in Italia (A Journey in Italy) presented were written in 2000 for an exhibition of Buccellati jewellery. These rhythmic, highly technical, winding and difficult pieces were variously inspired. L’ortolano (the gardener) had a complexity that was suggested by the use of illusion in painting by 16th century artist Arcimboldo. Is it a vegetable? Is it a human face? Is it a tune? Zobeide is a complex musical cityscape out of the imaginings of author Italo Calvino.

And the last piece, Frederico 11, reflected a 13th century king sensitive to more than European sounds.

It was an evening of musical challenges, superbly met.