Music / Heartstrings, Phoenix Collective. At Wesley Music Centre, March 1. Reviewed by GRAHAM McDONALD.

This was the Phoenix Collective Quartet’s first Canberra concert this year, conceived around a theme of love.

Of the three works performed, two came from a positive view of romantic relationships, the other not so much.

The concert opened with the Sonderho Bridal Trilogy, arrangements of three traditional dance tunes from a small town of Sonderho on the Danish island of Fano. This is one of a series of such works arranged by the Danish String Quartet, which the Phoenix Collective has performed over the years. As always, these are charming works that keep the spirit of the dance tunes while wrapping them up in inventive ways.

The second work was the String Quartet No 2 by Australian composer Ella Macens. It is titled A Love Worth Fighting For and written in the aftermath of a relationship breakup. It is impressionistic music, depicting the shifts in emotion as the relationship breaks down. It is not easy music to listen to, yet effective and contemplative. It is in four movements: Love, Longing, to be where we were, Fire and The Departure, which does end the work satisfyingly with a sense of acceptance and moving on.

The concert concluded with Alexander Borodin’s String Quartet No.2 in D major, written in 1881 and dedicated to his wife, a pianist. This is big music, using all that is available to the four instruments in tonal colour and musical effects. There are lots of pretty melodic fragments that get swapped around between the instruments and there is always something interesting going on. The third movement was used as part of the score for a 1953 Broadway musical, Kismet, as well as a short Disney animation from 2006, The Little Matchgirl.

A good part of making a success of a classical music ensemble is the skill to engagingly program concerts, finding connections between otherwise disparate pieces of music and combining them into a hour or so of live performance. The PCQ have been consistently doing this for years, and combined with the high level of their instrumental skills, it always makes for an entertaining, and often educational, concert.