Selby & Friends 1

Melba Hall, February 20

AT Melba Hall, Kathryn Selby and her TriOz partners - violinist Niki Vasilakis and cellist Emma-Jane Murphy - were joined by popular violist Irina Morozova in unfamiliar music by well-known names.

For most of us, the Mendelssohn Piano Quartet in F minor, written in the composer's early teens, was probably being heard live for the first time. Already, the composer displayed that precocious fluency that came to full flower three years later with the great String Octet, but this quartet writing blends its instrumental forces with considerable craft, even if the piano enjoyed sustained prominence. Selby relished the composer's rapid-fire passage work, notably in the outer movements, while Vasilakis and Morozova balanced the ledger with some duet work of high distinction.

After interval, the players worked through the Brahms Quartet in A major, the most substantial of the composer's three products in this form which took this recital into over-time. Once again, the group moved on to a higher level of achievement for the works' slow movements, the Mendelssohn's Adagio an object-lesson in ensemble control and dynamic subtlety, only outclassed by the equivalent pages in the Brahms work, where you wished that an already substantial movement could have been longer.