Goldner String Quartet
The Goldner String Quartet plays Peter Sculthorpe's complete string quartets with the authority of an ensemble totally inside the music: precise, tonally varied, and alive to landscape, ritual rhythm and sudden cascades of harmonics.
Formed from the string players of the Australia Ensemble at the University of New South Wales, they recorded Sculthorpe's quartets in his presence across three volumes that stretch from the austere lyricism of the mid-1960s through Jabiru Dreaming and Earth Cry to the late works of Quamby, asylum and deliverance. The playing is committed and superbly controlled: rich resonant cello lines, eloquent violin solos, and a grasp of Sculthorpe's vocabulary that links every contrast to the whole. Beyond that cycle they bring the same polish and human face to Nigel Westlake's passionate Second Quartet and other Australian chamber scores.
Goldner String Quartet is featured on the following titles
Peter Sculthorpe: The String Quartets, Vol. 3
Tall Poppies presents this third volume of Peter Sculthorpe’s string quartets as a tribute on the occasion of his 80th birthday in April 2009.
Peter Sculthorpe: The String Quartets, Vol. 2
The Goldner String Quartet, the string players of the Australia Ensemble at the University of NSW, presents this historic survey of Sculthorpe’s string-quartet oeuvre, available as a set on CD for the first time.
Peter Sculthorpe: The String Quartets, Vol. 1
The Goldner String Quartet — the string players of the Australia Ensemble at the University of NSW — presents this historic first volume, making Sculthorpe’s substantial body of string-quartet writing available on CD for the first time.
Goldner String Quartet also appears on
Nigel Westlake: The Hinchinbrook Riffs
Tall Poppies presents The Hinchinbrook Riffs: five chamber works by Nigel Westlake, whose amiable, approachable style has won him a wide and loyal audience in Australia and beyond.
Musica Viva: 60th Anniversary, Selected Commissions 1975–2004
This disc marks sixty years of Musica Viva Australia’s work commissioning Australian chamber music. Since 1945 the organisation had helped bring nearly a hundred new works into being, building a distinctive national repertoire. A full list of those commissions is included with the CD.
An Australian Collection
Nineteen tracks drawn from the Tall Poppies catalogue, chosen to show the range and depth of Australian composition and performance across the label’s first decade.
Members of Goldner String Quartet
Dene Olding
Australian violinist Dene Olding brings refined, expressive tone and sure intonation to chamber music that ranges from Schubert’s great C major Quintet to the full span of Peter Sculthorpe’s string quartets and new Australian scores.
Dimity Hall
Dimity Hall's violin is the quiet force inside the Australia Ensemble and Goldner String Quartet: refined tone locked with Dene Olding, chamber playing that can turn Schubert unearthly and Sculthorpe fierce without ever raising its voice for effect.
Irina Morozova
Irina Morozova's viola is the dark grain in the Goldner String Quartet and the Australia Ensemble: Sculthorpe's birdsong glissandi and ritual rhythms, Shostakovich's rough beauty, Mozart and Brahms clarinet quintets played with warmth and searching intensity.
Julian Smiles
Julian Smiles's cello underpins the Goldner String Quartet's complete Sculthorpe cycle and the Australia Ensemble's chamber recordings, from Schubert's String Quintet and Shostakovich's Piano Quintet and Trio to the Mozart and Brahms clarinet quintets.