David Farquhar was born in 1928 in Cambridge, New Zealand and educated at Canterbury, Victoria and Cambridge universities, and the London Guidhall. In 1953 he joined the Music Department of Victoria University, where he was appointed professor in 1976. A committed advocate of New Zealand music, Farquhar was founder-president of the Composers Association of New Zealand (CANZ) and a long-serving member of the board of the New Zealand Composers Foundation. The composer of over 100 works, Farquhar established his reputation in the realm of theatre music, especially the incidental pieces for Anouilh’s play Ring Round the Moon (original version 1953-7, suite 1975) and the 1962 opera A Unicorn for Christmas with libretto by Ngaio Marsh, which enjoyed a royal performance during the visit of Queen Elizabeth II to New Zealand in 1963.

The dance-suite Ring Round the Moon is Farquhar’s classic: it is populous, unpretentious and seemingly effortless, yet each movement is actually a triumph of compression that manages to combine the shapeliness of dance-tunes with the plashier riches of harmony and sonority. Indeed, that which is special and unique about much of Farquhar’s music is its lambency, its skim-factor, its prancing unencumbered motion. The persistent Stravinskian theme of the Scherzo for orchestra (1992), for example, appears harlequin-like under many guises, in different styles and scenes – here Sibelian with the northern forest, there Brittenesque with the glimmering sea, and elsewhere with echoes of Gabrieli’s ceremonial brass. In Magpies and Other Birds (1976), Farquhar’s interpretive use of Glover’s ballad stanza subtly opens the channels of personal as well as communal experience: the lament for a dead albatross at Karehana Bay is expressed most pungently and the caustic laughter of those magpies somehow signals the helplessness of us all.

Farquhar’s four string quartets, three symphonies and other extended works reveal a greater rhetorical sweep and more sustained intellectual purpose. What makes his String Quartet No.1 (1989), for instance, a work of classical force is the perfect posture it maintains as it moves inexorably through the demands of three densely compact dramatic movements; there is something reminiscent of Shostakovich in its frontal intensity. In the opening paragraphs of Evocation for violins (1957), we recognize immediately that Farquhar’s voice is in a deep old groove – one shared by Bartók’s ‘night music’ – and that he is hauling into sound an awareness sanctioned by bleak folk wisdom and by a high tragic understanding of life. And what constitutes the true originality of the composer’s Symphony No.1 is the combined sensation of strangeness and at-homeness which the sounds create: each expression is as surely and reliably in place as tussock on a hillside.

In the String Quartet No.4 (1998) and Symphony No.3, …remembered songs…, Farquhar shifts from the cerebral towards a sustained lyrical expression, distinguished by the purity and strength of composition along with a pronounced linearity. These are wonderfully resolved mature works – sensual landscapes where curves of swelling forms and velvet recesses are accentuated by his strong bright instrumental palette and expressive tonal modulations. This symphony, which retraces material from an earlier song cycle, articulates the composer’s grief for his wife Raydia d’Elsa, who died in 2001.

Robert Hoskins