This was a kind of offshoot from the Melbourne International Chamber Music Competition that was going on around town last week - a free show by one of the ensembles (hailing from Canada) that had already been eliminated from competition. They did a Mozart string quarter first (F major - K590 I think), and then a contemporary piece called "Another Little Piece Of My Heart" by a Kelly-Marie Murphy which shares its title with a Janis Joplin song and, according to the quartet's leader, was inspired by Joplin, jazz and emotional vs physiological concepts of the 'heart'.
Against expectations, I enjoyed the Mozart more - found it generally hard to get a handle on "Another Little Piece" (though the second movement was ace and bits of the third were quite striking, and I could definitely hear the Joplin influences in the stop-starting and sudden urgent crescendos and declarations), even though I thought it probably better suited the style of the quartet than the Mozart (Laura agreed, commenting on the soloistic nature of all four of the players and the slightly jarring dynamic this created in their collective performance).
