Month: May 2020

THE SCHUMANNS

Amir Farid

Melbourne Digital Concert Hall

Friday May 28, 2020

                                                                                      Amir Farid

Most of my experiences with pianist Amir Farid have come about through his association with the Benaud Trio, which I assume has now become something of a phantom ensemble, rather than the Melbourne chamber music stalwart that it was for several years.   These days, violinist Lachlan Bramble and cellist Ewen Bramble hold senior positions with the Adelaide Symphony and Farid himself has moved his base of operations to New York.   True, performances of any kind are impossible/improbable given the current world situation but you’d have to anticipate that Benaud re-appearances are likely to be rare, even when the world returns to what we laughingly call ‘normal’.

In fact, Farid is a victim of COVID-19 as he is marooned here for the duration.  About which he shouldn’t be too unhappy because, if there’s one place you’d rather be than Andrew Cuomo’s New York, it’s Daniel Andrews’ Melbourne.   While he’s staying in the Victorian capital until he regains access to the only American city worth visiting, Adele Schonhardt and Christopher Howlett invited him onboard their digital vessel, for which he produced an hour’s worth of works by that remarkable husband-and-wife pair, Clara and Robert Schumann.

It was never going to be an equal occasion.   One of Europe’s greatest pianists and teachers, Clara Schumann also left behind a sizeable catalogue of compositions that contained mainly piano works and songs.   In recent times, certain artists have performed much of her music, although the only score that I’ve had much acquaintance with has been her G minor Piano Trio.   But, set alongside her husband’s early masterpiece, the opening quartet of pieces was outclasssed.

Farid opened his innings with Clara Schumann’s 4 Flüchtige Stücke, small bagatelles that were published in 1845.   None of these is a demanding work and Farid encountered few problems in handling them.   The first, a larghetto in F Major, followed simple ternary form with interest added here by the pianist’s liberal approach to rhythm and a gentle emotional prospect delivered with care and no theatricality.   In A minor, Un poco agitato came over with spirit, a few mishaps in the right hand minor distractions and the miniature probably given at a slower speed than it deserved.   A following Andante espressivo  in D Major might have gained character from greater emphasis on the un poco più animato direction that covers the middle segment.   A few missed notes in this central section’s G major flirtation surprised for their avoidability, but little details like the exposed E in the 8th last bar’s first dominant 7th chord showed a sensitivity to the composer’s chord placements that compensated for some digital slips.

Farid followed an approach in the odd-numbered pieces that favoured an arpeggiation of many chords, even if they didn’t need it for his comfort’s sake.   This reinforced the Mendelssohn-derived impression that all these pieces made of following straight on from the Songs Without Words.   That influence showed out clearly again in the concluding G Major Scherzo with its slightly elliptical opening sentence and the reading came to a satisfactory fruition in the last A tempo section which revealed some welcome panache.  You could admire the fluency of these short pieces and their emotional candour but none of them presented as striking; competent, amiable, agreable, unambitious and, now that we’ve heard them, we won’t gain much by hearing them again.

With Robert Schumann’s Carnaval, written less than a decade before Clara’s 4 Fugitive Pieces, you come into a new world of pianism where the inspiration is a mirror of the Romantic era through its tempestuousness, sparkling brilliance, hard-centred sentiment and catholicity of subjects and material.   Most commentators don’t give it top-ranking in the composer’s oeuvre for the piano and God knows there’s plenty of competition: the Symphonic Studies, Fantasie, Arabeske, Bunte Blätter, Kreisleriana, Album for the Young, Faschingsschwank aus Wien, not to mention the sonatas, so I won’t.

Despite its languid rilievo passages, this work is in a hurry, calculated to stir you, if not exactly rouse you to Hong-Kong-demonstration point.   So it strikes me that a great reading carries you along on a wave of enthusiasm, even if part of you sits back and finds the whole exercise slightly ludicrous as it leaps from one character sketch to another.   Farid gave a worthy account of this large-scale suite, giving us easy access to the composer’s portrait gallery peppered with associated dances.   If the overpowering authority of a fully informed interpretation came across only fitfully, this pianist gave cogent views of Schumann’s large landscape’s many components.

A brave attack on the Preamble showed Farid’s welcome mastery of the hefty chords that can clot this movement’s bold initial statement.    A few top-end errors blurred the first-time-through declamation but the  move to Animato came across without jarring, the concluding rush a persuasive entity.    You can’t do much with the Pierrot pages which I find laborious, chiefly for those predictable forte interpolations that close each four-bar phrase until their shape eventually takes over; here, they made for a necessary evil, just as they do every time I hear this score.   Harlequin is just as repetitive but has a more attractive framework and the only flaw I could hear in Farid’s light-hearted approach was his tendency to extend the right-hand semiquaver rests in each odd-numbered bar.

A clear-speaking Valse noble distinguished itself by an unexpected interest roused in the dance’s second longer half by some left-hand emphases.   Moving on, you could admire the legato finesse during those odd septuplet and quintuplet groupings in Eusebius which across its length maintained metrical regularity and didn’t turn into sludge.   The mirroring Florestan enjoyed a rugged attack which urged forwards and faltered only once, in the only octavo bar.    Farid might have improved his Coquette with a quicker speed to encourage a more flighty impression, but the Replique that smooths out the preceding whimsy came across neatly enough, despite a rather laboured conclusion.

Schumann’s Papillons is infamous for its sforzandi which have the disturbing faculty of turning the insects into gnats; I would have preferred a more feathery approach, despite Clara Schumann’s directions in my edition, particularly in the middle bars of alternating semiquaver duplets.   But the following Lettres dansantes could not be faulted for clarity and lively address.   Further, the waltzy-suggestiveness of Chiarina was sublimated while the performer’s octaves were close to perfect, the only problem an accentuated ritardando at the conclusion of the second part’s repeat.   In this version, Chopin was done proud with a surging sensitivity in the melody’s outline, only a single misplaced note in bar 2 of the repeat disturbing the peace.

Right-hand octaves dominate the Estrella movement, occurring in about three quarters of its length; nearly all of these came off in a realization of the page’s muzzled power.  The canon between top and bottom lines in the B Major Reconnaissance interlude came through with telling definition and the main A flat melody’s reprise was splendidly restrained despite an error in its 5th bar.   Fortunately, the more difficult presto Pantalon et Colombine movement was technically assured and an indication of this artist at his best under stress.   Similarly, Farid’s Valse allemande and its internal Paganini pages proved eloquent and fierce in turn; I was sorry my equipment didn’t capture the ppp connecting chord that leads into the Valse reprise.   But it was a real pleasure to come across a pianist who kept his head through the semiquaver’s worth of displacement in Schumann’s individualistic picture of the phenomenal violinist and to find a musician who didn’t make a meal of the left hand accents.

The spirit of Chopin infused the 24 bars of Aveu which found the interpreter injecting a healthy dose of rubato throughout, accompanied by a restrained dynamic range: a very private confession, then.   Subtlety infused the Promenade as well, the ‘small’ notes articulated with excellent reserve and the large-reach chords starting 22 bars from the end worked particularly well.

Then came the rush through Pause with an almost invisible blip in the third last bar, and we were into the anti-Philistine Davidsbündler Marche, Schumann’s anticipation of Moomba (I wish) and one which brought a willing response from Farid whose 9th-stretch right-hand chords made for enviable listening.   Like many a player before (and probably after) him, this executant found the going boggy in that stage where Schumann repeats his Theme du XVIIième  siècle in the bass.  But so much of this powerful grind-’em-into-the-dust finale was successful, Farid surfing across the various changes of scene with no pause for breath, climaxing in a rousing stretto.

It wasn’t the Carnaval of your dreams, probably because the performer took the whole thing very seriously.   Much was made before and after this reading of Schumann’s intention to depict a party, which is quite right.   But it’s not meant to be a bierfest; rather, a congregation of high spirits and no little wit.   Even that concluding march-waltz shouldn’t sound as though it belongs in a Munich hofbräu but has to glitter, if not necessarily be gay.   For all that, Farid came to the centre of the composer’s world much more often than he missed it: a fine accomplishment with great promise –  surprisingly, one of the very few times I’ve heard this artist play solo.

A DISTANT LOVE

Andrew Goodwin and Roland Peelman

Melbourne Digital Concert Hall Satellite Night – Sydney

Wednesday May 20, 2020

                                                                               Andrew Goodwin

Spreading their entrepreneurial largesse around the country, Adele Schonhardt and Christopher Howlett have moved outside Melbourne and sponsored recitals in Perth and Sydney.    I’m sorry to have missed the Western Australian ones, in particular pianist Gladys Chua and clarinetist Ashley Smith (fresh from his personable appearance on ABC TV’s Hard Quiz) playing a program of  showpieces and operatic arrangements.  Wednesday night’s hour of lieder from tenor Andrew Goodwin and pianist Roland Peelman came from Sydney, given in a rehearsal room that put us right in the picture with the performers as well as alongside them in a dangerously clear acoustic.

Even given these close quarters for operations, both artists produced an engrossing experience through Beethoven’s An die ferne Geliebte cycle, five songs by Schumann, and seven by Schubert.   I don’t know if Goodwin and Peelman ever worked together in those happy pre-virus years but they made an ideal pairing on this night of works central to the repertoire,  although only a few of the artists’ selections get a regular airing.

For instance, the set of six songs that Beethoven linked together so that nothing is easily extractable have not featured large in the many vocal recitals I’ve attended.   This famine of performances might be due to the chop-and-change nature of the cycle’s content which, although consistent in expressing the lover’s proposals and dejections, asks for an unvarnished interpretation.   You won’t find the pathos or merriment, forced or authentic, that infuses the work of this program’s other contributors.   Instead, the sequence has a nobility and sincerity that takes you back to the same qualities in Fidelio where Beethoven faces his audience with a black-or-white morality that allows no wriggle room.

Some glitch meant that I came into this performance only at the first song’s second stanza, Weit bin ich.    But anyone could see (and hear) straight away that Goodwin was in command of the phrasing differentiation that gives the repeated vocal line its interest. Also evident from the start was Peelman’s sophistication as an accompanist, the connecting interludes given with care for each note’s weight, both artists enthusiastic across the stringendo beginning at und eine liebend Herz where the lover turns assertive.  The pianist impressed even further in the following Wo die Berge so blau with its end-of-stanza echo effects treated with punctilious regard for the song’s mood and the singer’s regretful lingering.    Peelman also gave Goodwin excellent support in the middle verse where the singer stays on one note and the keyboard has to make the melodic running; deftly accomplished here without demanding attention.

This cycle’s third segment, Leichte Segler, is a cow to treat fairly.   Goodwin had a red hot go at separating the isolated quavers that alternate with simple crotchets and he got a majority of the distinctions right, although the difference disappeared by the time we got to the last Flüstr’ ihr verses.   Both Diese Wolken in den Höhen and Es kehret der Maien could not be faulted, the highpoint for me coming in the latter song’s last stanza: a model of flawless delivery from both performers and a wrenching realization of Beethoven’s (and poet Alois Jeitteles’) simple regret.   As icing on this particular cake, the often awkward stretch in the final song starting at und sein letzter Strahl  –  pianissimo and with a griping set of chromatic slips – came over with fitting calm, almost detachment, before the final masculine rush to completion after the manner of Mary Queen of Scots.   This surge folded up an excellent piece of interpretation  –  the participants considerate of the composer and of each other.

Their Schumann bracket began with Du bist wie eine Blume, the first of three excerpts from the Myrthen cycle.   Only 20 bars long, shaped simply with not a space wasted, this found the interpreters happy to employ ritardandi to reinforce Heine’s Biedermeier sentimentality.   The second song I didn’t know at all; thanks to Goodwin’s email graciousness, I’ve learned that it was Intermezzo from the Liederkreis Op. 39 collection, one that I’ve not heard live for many years.    Here again, the duo demonstrated its unanimity of purpose with the tenor offering a full timbre in the song’s central strophes and Peelman contriving to make the constant syncopation a support rather than a distraction.

Another success came with the second Myrthen excerpt, Die Lotosblume; Goodwin combining sensitivity and passion, notably in the 6th and 7th last bars where Heine’s flower reaches a kind of floral orgasm.   More Heine followed with the Op. 127 Dein Angesicht; despite its chromatic shifts, this is a placidly self-contained effusion – remarkable, considering the text – which Peelman rounded out with an expertly judged postlude.

Last of all came the first of the Myrthen songs, Widmung, which musicians of my age associate inevitably with the Liszt transcription performed by Eileen Joyce.   Goodwin appeared to have a breath problem when he reached du bist die Frieden and Schumann’s minims and semibreves; in fact, throughout this central page, several sustained notes were cut short.   Much better followed in the reprise of Du, meine Seele which the singer treated with a captivating, smooth ardour.

For their Schubert offensive, these musicians opened with the first of two selections from Die schöne Müllerin.   In his efforts to furnish us with a brook-suggesting chain of sextuplets, some notes disappeared from Peelman’s right hand and an unfortunately palpable error crept in during the second-last bar; by comparison, Goodwin had it easy with one of the composer’s most infectious melodies.   Meyrhofer’s Nachtstück enjoyed a full-bodied handling, almost exuberant in its changes of scene/approach and moving into near-operatic mode at the suspenseful lead-in phrase und gedämpft, balanced by a lyrical calm that floated out at Bald ist’s vollbracht.

Third on the list was another Müllerin song, Halt, which through some aberration of memory I thought was Der Müller und der Bach: two lieder quite different in most ways but I grabbed onto the Bächlein, liebes Bächlein interjection and jumped the wrong way until Goodwin’s kind email set me straight.    This lied proved notable for Peelman’s finely gauged accompaniment that gave room to the voice despite being busy and interesting in its own right.   Nacht und Träume is another difficult task to undertake because it’s so soft that any attempt at inserting even a slight dynamic crisis seems cheap.   Tenor and pianist kept on the right side of piano although Peelman failed to articulate some of his interstitial right-hand semiquavers because of a determination to whisper his part; Goodwin also had trouble sustaining dotted minims in the work’s second part, and his final wieder found him out of puff.

I’ve not come across Ruckert’s Dass sie hier gewesen before but it made an appropriate sequel to Nacht und Träume because of a quizzical posing of harmonic questions and resolving them, if not in a hurry to do so.   Fortunately, the interpreters observed moderation, setting a fluent vocal part against the piano’s colourful commentary.   You might hear Ganymed at lieder society events but it’s not often included at non-specialist recitals.   For my money, this was the finest work of the night, beginning with a well-paced salute to Spring, then packed with brio from the accelerando on, up to a warm, fulfilling address to Goethe’s alliebender Vater.   The final piece, Ständchen, was given a robust interpretation, coming over more as a command than an entreaty with Peelman reaching hard for expressiveness at bars 9-10.     But then Goodwin made very impassioned statements of the second Fürchte, Holde, nicht! and Jedes weiche Herz.

Despite some minor flaws, this performance made for one of the most enjoyable bouts of craft that I’ve heard so far in this series.   Goodwin’s voice is a never-failing delight, splendid in its purity of articulation and dynamic command.   I’m accustomed to hear him in mobile vocal works, like the Bach Passions for which he is without peer in this country, but his technical skill and interpretative honesty were just as evident in this Romantic era material.   Up till now, Peelman has been associated in my experience with The Song Company’s appearances in the Melbourne Concert Hall.    On this occasion, he revealed another side to his talents through piano accompaniments of high quality which revealed an artist of thorough musicianship and insight.

CLARINET ADD STRINGS

David Thomas, Tair Khisambeev, Matthew Tomkins, Fiona Sargeant, Rohan de Korte, Elyane Laussade

Melbourne Digital Concert Hall

Monday May 4, 2020

                                                                                  David Thomas     

Here was one of the more interesting offerings in the Melbourne Digital series of broadcasts, which is currently working through a Faces of Our Orchestras series in which people we know well enough in a mass environment are abruptly yanked out of their customary cocoons and given the full spotlight treatment.   These performers are mainly from the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra ranks with some musicians that we see very rarely (unless you have developed an unhealthy habit of peering into the Arts Centre’s State Theatre) from Orchestra Victoria.   And you also see many pianists – Stefan Cassomenos, Leigh Harrold, Elyane Laussade, Rhodri Clarke  –  who have become well-known in their own rights or in partnerships with various chamber ensembles.

This evening hour (not quite)-long recital featured two works that put the MSO’s principal clarinet David Thomas front and centre: Mozart’s Quintet in A K. 581 – up there with the finest later outpourings from that impossibly fertile brain – and Prokofiev’s Op. 34 Overture on Hebrew Themes, written during a New York tour in the composer’s 28th year.   The string quartet for Mozart’s score was formed from MSO members, the same players taking part in the Prokofiev with Elyane Laussade negotiating the stolid piano element.  Thomas used first a basset clarinet, the instrument for which the quintet was written, then a normal B flat instrument for the 1919 composition.

Of the six performers on this occasion, I’d heard three in solo or chamber music situations: Thomas, usually in front of the MSO or lesser local bodies working his way through Mozart’s concerto; Laussade pretty much exclusively as a soloist although I have faint memories of a concerto appearance in one of the Myer Free concerts some time ago; and Matthew Tomkins during his solid stint as second violin with the Flinders String Quartet.   Sergeant and de Korte have been in the MSO ranks for some years now but Tair Khisambeev moved into the ensemble pretty much at the same time as I transferred north.

The loss was mine because the ‘new’ violinist has a very attractive timbre, as well as a laudable responsiveness to this luminous score, effectively setting off Thomas’ line with his own clean, calm support.   But much of the other string work in the first part of the quintet was not as carefully measured with a petty rough approach to dynamics from the three lower strings: their pianissimo proved to be a rugged creature ( bar 49), as did some individual brief exposures (e.g. the cello at bar 26).   Mind you, improvements had somehow come about in the exposition’s repeat.   Yet each felicity was balanced by a mishap, like the scatter-gun E Major chords that conclude the sonata form’s first part.  The development’s final bar arpeggios came across as over-weighty. almost clumsy so that the final impression you had of this quintet’s first gambit was of roughness in the details.

After a moving start to the Larghetto, the ensemble generated some more rough handling in support of the first violin/clarinet answer-and-response interplay that constitutes this movement’s chief  central interest.  The group certainly adhered to the piano direction for the main melody’s reappearance; probably too much so – that habit of gilding the dynamic lily with a studied, low dynamic entry serves more as a distraction, an all-too-obvious sign of sensitivity.   Much more satisfying was the following Menuetto which demonstrated that unforgettable Mozartian trait of combining elegance with near-predictability.   A disappointment came in the Trio I where Khisambeev went for a small dose of rubato, with nobody else allowing him any leg-room but plodding onward in strict adherence to an inner metronome.   Thomas enjoyed more success in Trio II, thanks to some available flexibility in several unaccompanied bars.  I don’t mean to pick on de Korte but his top  B in bar 107 stood out as this movement’s sore thumb.

Khisambeev and Tomkins showed excellent mutual sympathy throughout the theme statement that opens the finale, and the performance moved pleasantly enough through he first variation with its wide clarinet leaps, then the second one which was a display piece for Khisambeev’s sweet line, up through the Minore change with de Korte making a fine fist of his distinctive acciaccaturas.   We swung happily enough into the burbling fourth and last variation during which Thomas may have missed a semiquaver but I didn’t catch it.

Then transmission stopped; I lost sound and the online picture froze right at the Adagio, bar 85.  Back it all came after a break, only to disappear again.  The final buoyant Allegro surged out, but only for a few bars.

De Korte gave an address of sorts before the expanded ensemble essayed Prokofiev’s short piece, but this  prefatory talk too was interrupted.  We rejoined proceedings some way into the work and it soon turned into a stop-start process, during which I discerned, through the appearance-disappearance nexus, an unhappy cello high G sharp at Rehearsal Number 20.   But then, you just had to give up any hope of making sense of the piece: it was on and off all the way home.

A day or two later, Melbourne Digital made available a tape of the recital by way of compensation.   I picked up things at the Mozart’s last-movement Adagio when the rot had initially set in.   Things seemed to be going well when, all of a sudden, we had another stop, the music pausing for a black-out; mercifully, this time round, the performance resumed at the exact point at which it broke off.   De Korte’s Prokofiev preamble was also disrupted but at least we heard it complete.   You had enough time to settle into the Overture, Thomas slurring his phrases and doing a klezmer realization very deftly – then the interruptions resumed.   I counted 13 of them.  A lot, you’d have to admit.

It’s true that the work itself isn’t dependent on a flow-through effect building into lengthy paragraphs, like a Bruckner adagio.   Prokofiev seems to have eschewed the possibilities of the folk-tune collection given to him as source material and found his own, the results of which are simple and straightforward, enough to lighten up a post-Seder party in any right-thinking kibbutz.   But, even allowing for the reading being delivered in Reader’s Digest-sized clips, the experience was unnerving.

I’ve listened to and written reviews for six of these online recitals up to this one with every confidence in the delivery process but this Mozart/Prokofiev experience gives you cause for consideration.    If you can’t rely on the transmission, what are you paying for?  My wife tells me to come down to earth: these programs are to help the musicians involved in getting through some universally unhappy months: so what if there are defects in the delivery?  Yes, that’s well and good – admirable and very true:  Howlett, Schonhardt et al are providing an admirable avenue for local Melbourne performers to be heard and to get some remittance for their work – much, much more helpful than anything the federal government has put in place for artists.   But these musicians need to be heard without disruption, with minimal distractions.   Let’s hope the MDCH technicians can lift their game.

LET’S GET PERSONAL

Selby & Friends

Online performance selbyandfriends.com.au

Saturday May 2 – Tuesday May 12, 2020

                                                                                Kathryn Selby

One of the major losses I experienced when leaving Melbourne after 60 years’ residence was that of Selby & Friends recitals.   The ensemble’s venues had moved around like its personnel – from Melba Hall during the Macquarie Trio days, to the BMW/Deakin Edge, to the Tatoulis Auditorium at Methodist Ladies College in Kew.   Now, there is no fixed abode for this Bunte Blätter ensemble, just like the rest of the country’s/world’s chamber ensembles finding themselves adrift musically, if domestically tethered on an individual basis.   Besides, Queensland was never on the S&F touring agenda

Along the lines of the Melbourne Digital Concert Hall started by Christopher Howlett and Adele Schonhardt, Kathryn Selby has taken to the internet, presenting her 2020 season  –  or however much of it she needs to  –  through the web.   This latest program  –  all piano trios  –  veers towards the tried and true, comprising Mozart in B flat K 502, Beethoven Op. 1 No. 1, and Dvorak’s Dumky.   Where the Melbourne recitals come from the Athenaeum Theatre in Collins Street, Selby & Friends work from a well-appointed rehearsal room in Sydney Grammar School (Girls? Boys?) that sounds and looks tailor-made for chamber music, even if the prevailing acoustic properties favour the piano.

Anyway, it’s a real pleasure to have practised chamber musicians back on display, players who are experienced in the nuances of the format and who have some experience in collaboration from previous seasons.   The Melbourne Digitals have been well and good, in my experience, although more attractive in solo formats than in ad hoc collaborations.   But the mutual experience and the easy relationship between pianist Selby, violinist Andrew Haveron and cellist Umberto Clerici are shown in a trailer provided on the website as a substitute for program notes; even better, as these performers don’t have to stick to talking about the pieces that they are going to perform but can discuss the problems and delights of interpretation for every musician dealing with any work at all.   In this substantial preface (over 45 minutes), Selby acts as chairperson, asking her colleagues for their insights on specific questions, and Clerici shows himself irrepressibly voluble, even if sometimes he doesn’t finish his thoughts when his information outruns his vocabulary.   I don’t think Haveron opens his mouth until about the 12th minute.   But the material is well worth hearing – as it should be, coming from Sydney Symphony Orchestra principals and Selby with her impressively long-running career in chamber music.

A carefully shaped reading of the Mozart’s first movement is distinguished for its quiet assertiveness, reaching a delightful high-point at the short stretch between bars 45 and 48 where the strings play the second subject in tenths while the piano interrupts with piquant punctuation: the sort of moment that is brilliantly simple and here articulated without affectation – just another in the chain of spritzig throwaways that crop up across this score.   The truncated development ends with the smoothest of bridge passages from Selby whose melting from semiquavers to triplets just before the recapitulation gives us all a lesson in how to treat subsidiary matter with the proper respect.

Haveron’s timbre –  sweet, light on vibrato, not attention-grabbing – emerges clearly in the Larghetto‘s re-statement of the ornate first melody.   Another instance of valuing Mozart’s prodigality comes in the move to A flat Major at bar 57 where all three executants relish the innate eloquence of statement up to the return to E flat at bar 85 and another marvellously filled-out gift for the piano until the final bar.   As for the concluding Allegretto, here again is deliciously bright articulation, notably in the modulations at the movement’s core with barely a falter from anyone despite the rapid pace.   Sparkling clear in nature, the whole movement.

I’ve heard Selby powering through the first Beethoven E flat Piano Trio on several occasions in varied venues.   Her approach has become more sprightly, less determinedly full-frontal over the years and the result has been a honing of the score’s impressive continuity of action and thought so that the final impression is of assured deftness.   You notice her delivery subtleties more easily, like a momentary hesitation in the keyboard during the bar 146 syncopations.    To its high credit, this reading is devoid of silly games like unnecessarily inserted hiatus points; here, the complete consort dances together, Haveron a discreet presence, the two strings pretty much consistent with Selby’s definite downbeats.

Although the piano announces the Adagio cantabile‘s melting first theme, the action really gets under way when violin and cello embark on an affecting series of duets – well, a long duet with a few interruptions – that stick to their emotional last, giving delight on every page with Haveron’s eloquent phrase-shaping and Clerici breaking through the sonorous web with unflustered assertiveness.   Similarly, you would be hard pressed to find fault with the Scherzo‘s delivery; right from the start, the players demonstrate their mutual fidelity with those unisons/octaves from bars 8 to 16.   Here, you’re struck by Haveron’s precision and bounce as an incidental character across the second half of this segment.  Sensibly, the ensemble maintains the same tempo for the Trio rather than signposting the change of key as a mood swing, like other groups with less trust in Beethoven’s unshakable doggedness.

Most impressive about this Presto finale is its buoyant perkiness, largely due to Selby’s interrogative right-hand 10th leaps: the movement’s signature gesture.   And all three players keep up the humour without pounding or lumbering, best exemplified in the passage from bar 76 to the end of the first half during which the action hots up while the note values shrink.

Dvorak’s Trio No. 4 finds these musicians in full Romantic flow with an ardent. knock-’em-down assault on the scene-setting Lento maestoso, Clerici in particular happy to play front-of-house.   Selby drowns out her partners in the chromatic chord movement that concludes the first section of the second movement Poco adagio, even if you find no deficiencies in the faster Vivace parts of these opening parts to this colour-rich score.  A rare moment of disunity emerges in the strings’ response to the opening phrase of the following Andante; balancing this, the Poco meno mosso and its consequents sees violin and cello in excellent empathy, their output both mutually supportive and expressively empathetic.  In fact, the return to A Major just before the final Andante gifts us with the most moving moment in this interpretation: deeply-felt music played with admirable sympathy and insight.

Selby moves into supporting, almost self-effacing mode for the fourth dumky Andante moderato, emerging quite politely from retirement for the scherzando breaks to administer a fitting skittish tone to proceedings, then falling back to support the cello’s calm melody outline.  For the ensuing Allegro and its idiosyncratic oscillation between 6/8 and 3/4, the three musicians make a full-bodied shift into Dvorak’s skald-like narrative, the lines intensely strong at the violin/cello canons when the upper string begins playing arco.  Again, in the final Lento maestoso, we are offered another dark story with Haveron producing a powerful vibrato during the mid-movement slow interlude on the G string.    Still, the canvas here is a taxing one, difficult to negotiate without bathos or overkill and an ordeal for the pianist; Selby handles its leaps and twists with admirable security, only an occasional missing left-hand note disturbing the movement’s vital scenario.   You have to admire the remarkable fluency of the C Major prefaces to the final two Vivace stretches and the players’ escapes into vivid action.

No, it’s not the same as being there and watching a live performance.   But, in these non-piping times of enforced peace, close-to-current recorded readings on film are the closest we’re going to get to hearing our professionals at work.   And this is not a doctored CD set of interpretations.   What you hear on this site  (and at least one other) and can enjoy over and over until May 12 (not so on that other one) has to work as a momentary (!) substitute for the real thing.   I, for one, am delighted to have these on-line recitals available and will take them in good part until we get back to normal – a putative date for which seems to matter less to the government than the return of professional rugby matches and the opening of that vitally important indicator of a vibrant, socially undistanced society: tattoo parlours.