Brahms and Debussy

Last night I went to what might have been the best, certainly one of the best concerts of the Hutt Valley Chamber Music Society, now renamed Chamber Music Hutt Valley. ever put on. Pianist Deirdre Irons, violinist Vesa-Matti Leppänen, concert master and Andrew Joyce, principal cellist of of the NZ Symphony played Beethoven's Trio Op 70/2, Debussy's Violin and Cello Sonatas and Brahms's Trio No.2. The Debussy works, and particularly the Cello Sonata were strikingly original pieces, perhaps the most 'modern' innovative 20th century sonata for cello. The Brahms Trio, for all its transcendental passionate beauty, was a homage to the traditional, the comfortable settled times of Europe of the 1880s, a peaceful prosperous time between wars; the Debussy work written during the first year of the First World War, reflected the breakdown of tradition, the questioning of what the old masters, and by implication traditional culture and society stood for. It was exactly the kind of concert the small team of us who set up the Hutt Valley Chamber Music Society now almost 30 years ago planned to offer. The New Zealand Chamber Music Society, the Music Federation, closed down the Hutt series of concerts. We believed that we could organize series of concerts better without them. They offered us expensive overseas groups but not the top ensembles, so ours would have been a second tier series of concerts at first tier prices. This would not have worked. We thought that there is a wealth of New Zealand talent we could use, and the costs would be much more affordable. We could offer opportunities to local musicians and get music that our audiences wanted. It is very gratifying that what we set up so many years ago is still going strong. Now there is a younger generation taking over the committee, with great innovative ideas. May Hutt Chamber Music go from strength to strength.