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FROM ROMANCE TO RECKONING |
Primrose Potter Salon, Melbourne Recital Centre |
(L to R) Natalie Chee, Kathryn Selby, Richard Narroway |
No trouble getting the Romance in this program from Selby & Friends. As well as the magniloquent Mendelssohn Piano Trio No. 2 in C minor of 1845, we were treated to Schumann’s 1851 Violin Sonata No. 1 in A minor, and the same composer’s Drei Romanzen written in 1849: all solidly Romantic period material and coming from a tight six-year span in the middle of that rich artistic movement. As for the Friends, this time around we heard violinist Natalie Chee who is concertmaster of the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, and Richard Narroway who has taken up the role of head of cello at the University of Melbourne’s Conservatorium. |
It has to be noted straight way that the partnership between these two string players and pianist Kathryn Selby was close to ideal. All are musicians working at a high professional standard, as you’d expect, and they make excellent partners for their style of interpretation, especially through their full-frontal dynamic certainty and a highly satisfying care in phrasing – shaping lines with a synchronicity that startles and delights for its apparent ease and decisiveness. |
Right from the start of the sonata, Chee projected a strong line which matched Selby’s insistence on delivering every note audibly, even in those grumbling accompanying figures that start the initial Mit leidenschaftlichem Ausdruck movement. The performers repeated the 64 bars long exposition to give us a double-dose of forthrightness, and the development maintained their focus on intense delivery of this sonata segment that works tirelessly at its main theme. |
The middle F Major Allegretto strikes me as more scherzo than slow movement; well, so it would to anyone who isn’t interested in finding that these pages offer a fusion – they don’t and the prevailing atmosphere is that of light-hearted pleasure with two momentary more recessive moments. Chee took over the running for most of this segment, making the several recurrences of that opening three-bar motif a cleverly-shaped experience each time. |
With the Lebhaft that winds up this score, it was remarkable to observe the deft dovetailing (generally) of Selby’s entries with Chee after the violinist had set up the semiquaver patterns that dominate these pages. The pianist only misfired on one bass note and twice (that I heard) in her right-hand flurries but the sense of nervous energy that came across was a welcome change to the hectic pounding I’ve heard in the past (admittedly from student players). I don’t think any interpreter can do much to dry out the muddiness that comes when the piano moves into triplets just before the key-change to E Major in this movement’s central pages, yet Selby managed to surrender a dynamic front position to what is a pretty low-lying line from Chee. |
For Narroway’s duet contribution, the cellist (I assume) picked the Op. 94 Three Romances which were originally written for oboe and piano and which you very rarely hear in that format; I think Nick Deutsch might have given them to us during his years (2016-2020) as artistic director of the Australian National Academy of Music. The composer certainly allowed the violin to be considered as an alternative solo voice; I’m not sure about the cello, as the three pieces change markedly in colour and emotional suggestions when the lower-voiced instrument is employed. |
For example, the opening Nicht schnell impressed as more shadowy and sombre than when you hear it from a violin, particularly while the piece was developing (sort of) to a highpoint, then gradually wound itself back down into the dark. As another consequence, Selby’s part moved out of the background to work on equal terms with the cello’s output; not just in dynamic strength, which it would surrender when partnered with an oboe, but more in its stratum of operations, the focal line now sitting in the centre of the keyboard’s complex. |
The cello enjoyed more exposure in the next piece, Einfach, innig, probably because it is given a more four-square melody to work with while the keyboard may be active but appears to be working in a more constricted framework because it only occasionally doubles the string line. Selby moved further forward into focus across the central Etwas lebhafter F sharp minor interlude during which she played a continuous counterweight with her triplets. Later, both executants made the most of their final surge of energy between bars 72 and 74 where Schumann enjoys a simple chromatic side-step or two before a partial restatement and a touching fade to A Major placidity. |
The last romance, another Nicht schnell, proved to be a gem of narrative and melody-shaping, during which I could find no faults in the frequent octave doublings, and the approach and recovery from the several fermate that dot the action. It was simply one of those happy moments of duo performance where the quiet lyricism of the work grabs your attention and nothing distracts you from its progress; not an essay in concentrated effort but a display of dedication from two artists fused in the completion of a happy task, if not one with mighty challenges. |
We ended the night with the formidable Mendelssohn trio about which I can say little except to point to the power of this interpretation which realized the score’s potential in many ways. Although we came to enjoy the composer’s first essay in this form after its sort of re-discovery in the 1970s and 1980s, most of us would have made our acquaintace with this C minor work during those chamber music competitions that occupied this city’s attention in the pre-COVID years, during which time it became a favourite among piano trio competitors. |
With these three musicians, the score enjoyed a treatment that proved bracing, aggressive and loaded with drama. All probably unconsciously put an emphasis on the fuoco term in the first movement’s performance directive, Selby fulfilling a role that she has taken on many times over the years with this work. Mendelssohn gives the piano first dibs with a sequence of attention-grabbing common chord rumbles and places most interest to the keyboard part through its sheer activity while the strings enjoy the soaring power of the opening melody (Letter A in some post-1874 editions I’ve come across). |
Once again, as in the preceding duo works, the players kept steady hands during this movement’s rushes into action, and then pitched their approach to the second subject and its re-appearances with exemplary care for each other. The pianist was able to arpeggiate with firm abandon, secure in the knowledge that both her colleagues were capable of etching their lines in the fermenting fabric. |
But Mendelssohn makes a gift to the keyboard at the opening to the Andante by leaving it to outline the first subject alone in the initial eleven bars before violin and cello treat it with melting sixths and thirds. After which, it’s a glorious ambling journey to the dynamic (and harmonic) climax 12 bars from the placid conclusion: the whole process a moving experience in this interpretation. |
As for the rapid Scherzo, I relished the deliberate contrast between the fairy-light semiquaver-rich opening and the heft of the new theme that emerges at the change to G Major with Selby giving her peers plenty of space to drive the composer’s donward-scale tune, yet canny enough to prepare us aurally for the return to Titania-and-Oberon-Land with those left-hand semiquaver clicks eleven bars before the change back to G minor. |
Still, it’s a rare trio that can’t make a success of the finale to this work with its bounding first theme, the assurance found in the sweep of its E flat Major consequent that never quite resolves, and the initial quiet statement in the piano of the Vor deinen Thron chorale with the strings at first quietly capering around it. Here, the performers hit the same vein of elevated rhetoric that they mined in the work’s opening with a consistent breadth of timbre and a fluent movement between restraint and force that would have brought this audience to its feet if it hadn’t been, in the main, somewhat elderly. |
As for the Reckoning proposed in this recital’s title, I believe that came in the evening’s opening miscellany: the Fire Dances of 2020 written by eight Australian women composers. This collection offers different views of the 2019/20 bushfires that hit the nation so severely, the composers moving from the initial smoke to the ashes that danced around for weeks after the furnace was doused. All were brief, half of them under two minutes, the longest slightly over two-and-a-half minutes. |
Nat Bartsch‘s Haze for Days gives us a piano part of upward-sweeping arpeggios, the strings generating rather tonal melodies over the top in a mildly suggestive musical picture. Olivia Bettina Davies‘ Haze (a trio version of an earlier guitar piece from 2015) came over as a more visceral exercise, her violin and cello lines mainly sustained, then some slow glissandi to suggest the undergrowth’s rustling in anticipation. In Crowning Dance, Natalie Williams imagines the fire reaching treetops and leaping across them, set out in a contrapuntally complex burst of activity something like a close-order invention. The cello outlines a mobile semiquaver ostinato in Maria Grenfell‘s Wall of Flames, the piano indulges in some high-pitched pointillism, the violin produces eerie sound effects, and the effect that this piece eventually achieves is percussive and frenetic. |
The cello outlines an ostinato at the start of Hilary Kleinig‘s Fire Storm, above which piano and violin generate vehement noise slashes, some of them improvised; while this is slightly suggestive of a fierce weltering violence, it sounds odd because of its basis in a solid minor tonality – C? In the suite’s longest segment, Elena Kats-Chernin documents In the Embers’ Path with all three instruments partaking in a chugging motion of some heft. For most of the piece’s length, the pulse remains four-square in rhythm, everybody coming together for a safe-as-houses finale. |
Cycads After Fire by Cathy Applegate refers to plant regrowth after the fire has passed; optimistic in flavour, this is more of a piece de salon than anything else in the collection, set in a definite tonal backdrop with lush lyrics for all. Finally, Isabella Gerometta‘s Will-O-Wisps (I think the composer is referring to the ‘will-o’-the-wisp’ or ‘will-o’-wisp’ phenomenon, classically oriented as ignes fatui) uses the violin in alt with the cello in small scraps of sound, the piano being the progenitor of some lightly-delivered activity. |
As a suite, Fire Dances has its moments although the variety of voices works against any sense of uniformity of approach – or of reaction, to be honest. Some of the pieces appeal for their ability to illustrate their titles; others have success in suggesting striking emotional responses to those often horrific, often tragic days. But the oscillation between different styles of composition makes the work something of a grab-bag – interesting in parts rather than for its totality. |
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