Fragments: music from New Zealand for classical guitar

Guitarist Matthew Marshall

…emotional depth, tonal colour and creative interpretation.

In February 1993 a young classical guitarist walked into Studio One at Broadcasting House on Wellington’s Bowen Street. On his music stand Matthew Marshall put a set of short guitar pieces by some of New Zealand’s finest composers. Over several sessions during the next two years, he recorded almost the whole collection, collaborating with the expert engineers and producers of what was then known as Concert FM. The recordings were broadcast and then consigned to RNZ’s archive.

Since then, Marshall has developed an impressive international performing and teaching career and after many years teaching at tertiary level in England and Australia is now based in New Zealand at the Eastern Institute of Technology as Professor of Music. He has never turned away from his commitment to guitar music by New Zealand composers, and now, more than a quarter of a century later, those early recordings have been extracted from the archives and given new life. Fragments is one of the first releases by a new New Zealand imprint, Rattle Echo.

The centrepiece of Fragments and the most substantial work of the album is Douglas Lilburn’s Seventeen pieces for guitar, written in 1969-70 for Ronald Burt. This group of short pieces was written at a time when Lilburn was mostly turning away from instrumental music to electro-acoustic composition. The set shows the composer in his spare late modernist style and is comparable to the better-known Nine Short Pieces for piano from a few years earlier.

Marshall brings great emotional depth to his playing. The second Lilburn piece, for instance, related to the popular setting of Denis Glover’s Sings Harry, is played with a poignant nostalgia that could bring one to tears. The use of tonal colour to mark out the lines of counterpoint is brilliantly successful. Many of the Seventeen Pieces have seductively inventive melodic lines which are beautifully played with careful placement of accompanying chords and counter-melodies. 

Fragments spans forty years of New Zealand composition for the guitar, from David Farquhar’s Spanish-influenced Musette from 1951, probably the earliest New Zealand work for the instrument, to several works from 1991, including two from the younger generation of composers.  Anthony Ritchie’s Melancholia is a slight work but lifted by thoughtful playing full of variety and Marshall’s lovely attention to musical detail evokes the gentle atmosphere of Kenneth Young’s Three Sad Waltzes. The album ends with a jaunty, tongue-in-cheek encore piece, Harry’s Rag by Christopher Norton.

Closely-miked recordings and careful production enhance the intimacy. Marshall gratefully acknowledges the “world-class work” of these sound artists in his album notes. Bringing such fine recordings back to life is a great role for the Rattle Echo imprint to play and I’m looking forward to more projects like this. 

There’s a footnote to this story. In 1997, just a few years after these recordings were made in RNZ’s beloved Studio One, Broadcasting House itself, already scheduled for demolition, was razed to the ground by a mystery arsonist. It was the sad end to a raging and often political controversy about the fate of the modernist building and its state-of-the-arts sound-isolated wood-lined studios, which you can read more about here.

Fragments Matthew Marshall, guitar (Rattle Echo)

Available from Rattle or SOUNZ, Centre for New Zealand Music

You can listen to a recent RNZ Concert Upbeat interview with Matthew Marshall about Fragments, illustrated by some of the tracks, here.