One & Only

ALSO ending their Melbourne visits for this year, TrioZ presented three piano trios by composers who attempted the form only once. Every chamber music aficionado is aware of Tchaikovsky’s A minor Trio, written in memory of Nicholas Rubinstein and presenting its pianist executants with a series of fiery tests. Kathryn Selby took to the score’s virtuosic pages with compelling power, working through the finale’s sequence of cleverly juxtaposed variations with confidence and alternating between sparkling lightness and pounding insistence.

Violinist Niki Vasilakis and cellist Emma-Jane Murphy realized the passionate lyricism of the work’s long first section, the lower string mirroring Selby’s show-no-fear attack with some searing, ardent melodic streams. Both cello and violin showed at their best in the C sharp variation with an ideal interfacing of material, to the point where the players’ vibrato seemed to be synchronized.

TrioZ opened with Faure’s neglected D minor Trio, a work that gives the violin a good deal of attention, the piano kept busy as well; but the piece’s interest arose for this listener from the harmonic shifts and ambiguities rather than its melodic shapeliness. The players also gave an airing to Anglo-American composer Rebecca Clarke’s Piano Trio of 1921, an extraordinarily assured construct for its time and provenance. You hesitate to make too great a claim for its originality, but the score shows an original and adventurous mind at work, here exposed with impressive authority in an exemplary performance.