Lonely Angel (Selby & Friends)
With friends Julian Smiles and Dimity Hall, Kathryn Selby delivers a sublime evening of European chamber music.
Selby & Friends’ season finale showcases music from Spain, France, Latvia and Germany while highlighting the evolution of chamber music and piano trios in Europe.
The performers are Kathryn Selby, piano; the friends this time are the husband-and-wife team of cellist Julian Smiles and Dimity Hall on violin.
This evening commenced with the Piano Trio No. 2 in B minor, Op. 76 by Joaquín Turina, a Spanish composer who helped create the distinctive national sound of 20th-century Spanish music. Three dramatic measures into the trio, the main theme states its presence. From there, it moves with a strong Spanish passion.
It is a grand, showy and moving piece, and these three highly experienced players bring out its inner depth and clarity in a tempestuous performance. Rapid violin tremolos, crashing piano chords and a strongly plucked cello add to the drama of the work. While quite a short piece, it is all entertainment-plus.
Almost immediately, the melody on the cello lets you know that the next work is Gabriel Fauré’s Piano Trio in D minor, Op. 120. The andantino second movement is a perfect response to the attacking opening allegro. Full of love and swooning, it gives way to a final movement that restlessly finds its way to a dramatic finale.
Latvian composer Pēteris Vasks’ single movement Lonely Angel, for piano trio, came to him in, he said, in a vision. As a meditation, a cry, and what it feels like after pain, this ethereal composition is more about release than emotion. A release from the pain of the world, into the pleasure of music. Completely sublime.
The evening finishes with the Piano Trio No. 3 in C minor, Op. 101, by Johannes Brahms, a sprawling work never far from concert stages across the world, or on the airwaves.
In thunder and storm, this mammoth work begins. What was striking in this performance was the perfect timing of Smiles and Hall on strings. Their understanding of this profound music seemed identical. And, as always, the seamless performance by Selby on piano, is a joy to hear.