Canberra Times, Tuesday January 16th 2007
ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT

Back with help from her friends

Kathryn Selby finds a new path for her trio, W. L. Hoffmann writes.

WHEN brilliant young Australian pianist Kathryn Selby returned to Australia from New York in 1988, she set about establishing a group of instrumentalists which initially gave chamber music performances in the Sydney Powerhouse Museum as Selby and Friends.

In New York, Selby completed postgraduate training at the prestigious Julliard School of Music and then worked for some years in the highly competitive music scene in the city. Selby and Friends in Sydney eventually led to the founding in 1993 of a permanent trio of piano, violin and cello which was sponsored by Sydney’s Macquarie University and was thereafter known as The Macquarie Trio. This group soon established a national reputation for excellence, with annual series of subscription concerts, first in Sydney and then in Melbourne, Canberra, Brisbane and Adelaide. So it was a shock to audiences when, without warning, Macquarie University announced in the latter part of last year that it was withdrawing its support and the ensemble was being disbanded. With the help of some of her friends, Selby managed to put together two ad hoc groups which were able to fulfil the commitment of providing the final two concerts of the year, but the future looked grim. ‘‘That was a very bad time for me,’’ she said last week. ‘‘But the response of our audiences around the country was quite

wonderful. I received hundreds of personal letters and emails, and everyone was so very supportive and wanting our concerts to continue. It was this response, together with the fantastic reception given to the two replacement programs which we presented to complete our promised 2006 season, that inspired me to consider ways of creating a new series of chamber music concerts that would continue the tradition for fine musical performances that we had been able to establish over the previous 14 years.’’

Certainly, that final concert last year when she was joined by two of Australia’s finest string players – exciting young violinist Niki Vasilakis and cellist Emma-Jane Murphy, formerly principal cellist of the Australian Chamber Orchestra – was a memorable event, highly acclaimed by critics and audiences.

Now Vasilakis and Murphy have joined Selby to form a new piano trio, as yet unnamed, which will be the central feature of a new series of concerts this year. The trio will perform three of the five programs being presented this year, with other notable Australian and overseas musicians appearing with Selby at the two remaining concerts. The new series uses the old name of Selby and Friends.

In Canberra the concerts will be performed on Monday nights in the Fairfax Theatre of the National Gallery of Australia, but now only at 7.30pm with the previous additional performance at 5.30pm having to be abandoned because of the financial constraints in realising the new venture.

The first concert will be on March 19 when the program will comprise three of the finest works from the piano trio repertoire – Beethoven’s Kakadu Variations Op 121a, the Piano Trio in C minor, Op 66 by Mendelssohn and Ravel’s incandescent Piano Trio in A minor. The May concert will introduce to Australian audiences a young United States chamber ensemble, the Janaki String Trio from Los Angeles. This is a very welcome inclusion in this year’s programming as works from the quite extensive string trio repertoire are rarely heard in the concert hall, and they will be playing trios for violin, viola and cello by Beethoven and 20th-century Polish composer Krzystof Penderecki, and then joining Selby in a realisation of the very lovely Piano Quartet in C minor by French composer Gabriel Faure.

The Selby-Vasilakis-Murphy Trio will provide the central program of the season on July 30 with a widely varied program of piano trios by Beethoven, Dvorak and Spanish composer Turina, while there will be further variety in September when virtuosic young Australian cellist Li-Wei, who has achieved a formidable international reputation for the brilliance and high musicality of his playing, will be another ‘‘friend’’ joining Selby for a cello-piano recital of works by Schumann and Beethoven, and concluding with the highly virtuosic Moses Variations by Paganini. This attractively diverse season of concerts will conclude in November with another program of piano trio delights, opening with Haydn and then followed by two of the greatest works in this form – Beethoven’s Ghost Trio in E flat, Op 70, and Schubert’s monumental Piano Trio in B flat. In speaking of these programs Selby said, ‘‘Canberra has always been a special place for me. The National Gallery venue provides a unique intimacy and I have always enjoyed so much playing there in the past. The supportive audiences, and the warmth of their enjoyment of our performances, is a happy memory for me. I do hope they will continue to support us in the future.’’