Alfred Hill : String Quartet No 2 'Maori' (1907) - III Scherzo. The Karakia (Incantation) & The Coming Of The Birds

Abstract

Alfred Hill was born in 1870 and died in 1960, living through the establishment of much of the contemporary musical infrastructure in Australia and New Zealand. He must have watched the first half of the twentieth century unfurl varieties of musical possibilities which, even if he understood them, were anathema to his own style which was already at least a quarter of a century old as the century changed. Hill was a prolific composer, writing in most musical forms, and finding a generally sympathetic audience in Australasia. He embraced larger forms, symphony and opera, as well as songs and a variety of chamber music. Of the seventeen string quartets he wrote, the eleventh (D minor, 1935) was his favourite. Audiences have demonstrated a preference for the second (G minor, 1907), a piece written whilst on holiday at Hampden in New Zealand's South Island. When published by Breitkopf and Hortel in 1913, number two carried the title 'Maori'. For Roger Covell (Australia's Music, 1967), the second quartet is 'none the worse for the fact that its tender, docile tunefulness makes us think less of the heroic legend attached to its 'Maori' subtitle than of Dvorak at his most pastorally engaging'. Covell compares Hill to the Australian poets Hugh McCrae and Henry Kendall, finding similarities in their clinging to the 'cool, wet greenness of the Australian coastal valleys [rather than] grappling with the immense, raw vistas of the inland'. The Queensland State String Quartet is led in this performance by Ernest Llewellyn, who later became the founding Director of the Canberra School of Music.