The Tūī and the Kahikatea

Peter Scholes clarinet
Simeon Broom violin
James Tennant cello
Katherine Austin piano
Faumuina Felolini Maria Tafuna’i Poet

This group of four well-known New Zealand musicians first came together with Faumuina Felolini Maria Tafuna’i in 2023 to present a concert which combined what is perhaps the most celebrated chamber music composition of the 20th century with Pacifica poetry, speaking to the issues of our age.
The performers present a reflective evening of music and poetry. The famous eight-movement quartet by Olivier Messiaen (1908-1992) was composed in a prisoner of war camp during the Second World War. He was an organist/pianist, and in the camp, under trying conditions, there was also a violinist, a clarinettist and a cellist. “If I composed this quartet for anything,” Messiaen wrote later, “It was to escape from the snow, the war, the captivity, to escape from myself. What I gained most of all from it was that, among three hundred thousand prisoners, I was perhaps the only one who wasn’t a prisoner.”

This music, at times angry, at times a lament, at times bursting with bird song, leads us to a place of simplicity and transcendent beauty, taking us to the core of our existence and a place of courage in the face of what we seehappening in the world. Faumuina Felolini Maria Tafuna’i brings dramatic presentations of her poetry about the threat of climate change to the Pacific Islands and of “wayfinding” our path from the present situation. The poems are carefully matched with the mood of each movement. The impact is powerful.