Music by Matthew Hindson and Carl Vine was part of the Goldner String Quartet’s farewell to the concert platform after three decades of performances at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music on 8 December, presented by Musica Viva Australia.
Their final programme opened with Hindson’s Nothing is Forever (2018) – a piece they also presented at the Australian Festival of Chamber Music and at UKARIA Cultural Centre this season, as part of the numerous farewell concerts they have given across Australia in 2024. The 6-minute work, originally written for the Australian Chamber Orchestra, is a tender, soothing work, built around an elegiac, sighing melodic figure in A minor. Violist Irena Morozova described the significance of the piece to her in Limelight:
The title says it all, really…It’s an important one for me because it was written for the Hush Music Foundation, which has made lots of recordings specifically for people in hospital and healthcare environments, and we were directly involved with two of their projects. From my own experience as a parent, I know how much music helps in pain and stress management.
The Goldners also performed Carl Vine’s Harbour Reverie (2014). The 4-minute work imagines the sights and sounds of a morning commute across the Sydney Harbour, taking the harbour ferry into the city. It was written to honour former Musica Viva Australia CEO Mary Jo Capps, who had recently moved to Sydney, and traces in the music the pattern of a typical morning in her new life. The Goldner String Quartet have been among Musica Viva’s flagship ensembles in recent decades; the organisation, where Vine was Artistic Director for twenty years (2000-2019), looks forward to its 80th anniversary in 2025.
The performance underlines the Goldners’ longstanding relationship with Carl Vine, who also marked a milestone in 2024 with his 70th birthday. In 2012 the Goldners recorded his string quartets for ABC Classics, and their valedictory season has seen performances of his chamber music at the Adelaide Festival and Melbourne Recital Centre – his String Quartet No.5 – as well as piano quintet Fantasia (2013) at the Australian Festival of Chamber Music with Piers Lane, a work they premiered at the Huntington Festival in 2014.