Over more than three decades the New Zealand String Quartet has remained the country’s sole full-time professional ensemble of its kind, devoting itself equally to works by local and Asian creators and to the standard Western canon. Violinists Wilma Smith and Gillian Ansell joined violist Sandro Costantino and cellist Josephine Young to establish the group in 1987; by 2018 the membership comprised violinists Helene Pohl and Monique Lapins, violist Gillian Ansell—who had moved from first violin in 1989—and cellist Rolf Gjelsten. International visibility increased when Musica Viva sponsored a tour in 1990, and the following year the quartet accepted a continuing residency at Victoria University of Wellington, where every member was appointed associate professor by 2014. Roughly eighty concerts are given each year inside New Zealand, while further engagements have taken the ensemble to Australia, the United States, Britain, continental Europe, China, Korea, and Canada—where repeated appearances have occurred at the Festival of the Sound in Parry Sound, Ontario—as well as to Mexico for a 2006 performance at the Festival International Cervantino in Guanajuato. In 2016 the quartet traversed New Zealand alongside American jazz pianist Uri Caine, and it has also joined forces with taonga puoro exponent Rob Thorne, appearing together at the NZ Festival in 2018.
Recordings have likewise juxtaposed core repertory with regional voices from the ensemble’s earliest days. An ambitious survey of Bartók’s quartets appeared on the Manu Music label in 1996, while complete multi-disc traversals of the Brahms and Mendelssohn quartets were issued by Naxos; the Brahms project ended in 2017 with a release that also contained the Clarinet Quintet in B minor, Op. 115. Additional projects for the Atoll label, among them the 2012 album Notes from a Journey, have featured New Zealand composers, and that same year the quartet issued Asian Music for String Quartet, presenting works by composers from China, Japan, and Cambodia.
