This latest concert by Acacia Quartet  featured dynamic works  from the late nineteenth century and beyond. The selected works showcased the  Acacia Quartet members’ ensemble skills and highly empathetic communication with each other as they performed deeply emotional, descriptive, complex and intricate music.

In this consistently beautiful programme  we were also introduced to some of the few chamber music works written by opera composers Puccini and Verdi. Acacia Quartet showed it had all of the required resources to deliver to us in chamber format the musical scope, drama, delicate turn of phrase and depth of feeling typically found emanating from an opera theatre’s stage.

To begin the concert, Acacia delivered perhaps the most programmatic and searching work of the afternoon. Turina’s La Oracion del Torero set the high standard of expression, tone  and careful interplay between parts which would consistently feature in Acacia Quartet’s interpretation throughout the afternoon.

We enjoyed following the alternating strands of the bullfighting arena in this work’s story and prayer for help. There were seamless and knife-edge shifts between the quartet’s scored textures  depicting the raucous sport and internalised fear of death on behalf of the bullfighter praying for survival. Acacia’s players gave us an expressively measured and balanced performance. The narration was enriched by the realisation of a myriad of hues, shapes and emotional states.

From fear and religious imploring in this work, the quartet next delivered a more recent twentieth century work by a living composer. John Peterson’s intelligent but vibrant work String Quartet No 3, originally written for Acacia Quartet is a composition devoid of an extra-musical story or concerns. In the hands of these players the intellectual complexities of rhythm and musical role-sharing in the outer movements resulted in music making of a very joyous nature.

In what was a concert event rich in intimate and focused moments, the Molto Lento e molto agitato central movement was an expressive highlight. Peterson’s fine architecture here and Acacia Quartet’s delivery were impressive examples of musical stillness. In a similar vein, the extended pizzicato section in the final movement was a success in terms of compositional effect and precision in  performance.

Preceding interval, the programme returned to a highly emotional work in which we could escape as an audience into the reactions to life’s challenges as experienced by the composer. Puccini’s I Crisatemi, or ‘Chrysanthemums’ was written quickly to document feelings of the grieving composer following the death of a friend.

This piece unfolded lovingly before us in this concert. Puccini’s inimitably direct language used to evoke feeling and place in orchestrations for his operas was condensed into the full-voiced quartet textures before us. This quartet met Puccini’s challenge of instrumentation, conveying the emotional concerns in a lush and well-projected reading of the eloquent score.

Following interval came what was arguably the pinnacle of all persistent highlights in the afternoon’s listening experience. Verdi’s only surviving chamber music work, the String Quartet in E minor (1873) was a large scale operatic-like outpouring which here was shown to effectively fit into the string quartet genre. Quite symphonic in sound and structure, the contrasts of character, timbre and instrumentation were conveyed despite the expressive demands of the work.

To conclude the concert’s rich communication was the event’s namesake, Italian Serenade by Hugo Wolf. As Elizabeth Dalton’s fine programme notes explained, this was another work featured in the concert to be composed over a very short period of time. In 1887, Wolf composed the single-movement work in just three days. It rounded off the varied programme with much musical idiom, caricature and the composer’s unique voice, nicely captured by the Acacia Quartet members.

The attentive and skilful listening and interplay between quartet members as featured throughout the afternoon continued here, ensuring nuance and momentum were thoughtfully  varied and clearly conveyed.

The generous audience ovation for Acacia Quartet’s efforts was well deserved. Acacia Quartet [Facebook] will be joined by violist Emile Cantor for their next concert of quintets on July 8. Once again at The Independent Theatre North Sydney, it includes Mozart, Dvorak and a work by Australian composer Nick Wales. This next concert promises to entertain as much as the recent event did.