Hot on the heels of the Blackheath Chamber Music Festival, Mountain Productions begins its 2023 concert series with a performance by the Goldner String Quartet at Katoomba’s Palais Royale Hotel.

The Goldner String Quartet performs at the Palais Royale in Katoomba, May 2023. Photo © Keith Saunders

The concert is bookended by Harry Sdraulig’s String Quartet No. 1, commissioned for the Goldners in 2020 by Port Fairy Music festival and ABC Classic, and Dvořák’s American written while the composer stayed in the Czech community of Spillville, Iowa in 1893.

The two works complement each other perfectly. The three movements of Sdraulig’s Quartet share the same point of departure, which he describes as “a ‘distorted’ sonority on C”. The final movement features both harmonic phrases and meditative passages that recall Dvořák’s folk-inflected American works and those they inspired, like Copland’s Appalachian Spring.

Both Sdraulig and Dvořák make heavy demands on the virtuosity of violinists Dene Olding and Dimity Hall, but violist Irina Morozova and cellist Julian Smiles are also given ample moments to shine.

The first of these is in the second movement of Sdraulig’s Quartet, Quickly. Impressively frenetic bowing by Olding and Hall...