THIS MIRROR HAS THREE FACES
Selby & Friends
Primrose Potter Salon, Melbourne Recital Centre
Tuesday May 13, 2025
Kristian Winther, Kathryn Selby, Clancy Newman
One of the grievous losses about moving to the Gold Coast was the loss of Selby & Friends recitals; you can hear the various combinations in Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, Canberra, even Bowral, but crossing the Tweed has never been part of the organization’s reach. And a great consolation in leaving behind the Not-Too-Deep North’s sybaritic delights is a reacquaintance with Kathryn Selby‘s mobile set of musicians and the assurance that the high quality of these events has not diminished in the interim.
Selby is the fulcrum pianist for this annual sequence of five programs that usually follow the piano trio format and, for this Tour No. 2 in 2025, her associates were violinist Kristian Winther and a long-time favourite of these events in cellist Clancy Newman. The latter I remember seeing several times before leaving Melbourne and being favourably impressed by his enthusiasm and reliability. Winther was a constant presence up to his departure from the Australian String Quartet in 2014 under unsettling circumstances. Since then, his career has remained a series of sporadic appearances in my experience, but clearly the years have been kind to him as he’s playing with the same vivid personality and skill as he showed ten-plus years ago.
Selby encourages her colleagues to share in the introductory talks that have become part-and-parcel of chamber music recitals over the years. Sometimes these can be excruciating because of personal awkwardness or lack of preparation. Newman’s had a layer of personal interest as he introduced Lera Auerbach‘s Piano Trio No. 2 – Triptych: This Mirror Has Three Faces (which may be the case, even if the work holds five movements). This work was written in 2011 and was commissioned by the Arizona Friends of Chamber Music and the Weiss/Kaplan/Newman Piano Trio; the cellist has been asking Selby to program some Auerbach and here she has obviously succumbed.
This score from the Russian/American writer makes an arresting opening with some powerful piano output, and its progress can be traced from moderato to allegro even if the harmonic language remains unsettlingly familiar and confrontational in turn. The composer tends to play through from one panel into another as the several facets (of one person? of three?) that distinguish the construct’s intellectual process are mapped; fortunately the central waltz gave us a fulcrum to work with as the various personality idiosyncrasies of this venture piled up on either side.
As far as I could judge, the final adagio sounded the most substantial of the movements: a spacious postlude that brought to a simpler ground all the compositional complexities that preceded it. But Auerbach’s score is intriguing, even in the abstract; we don’t know what to look for in her mirror, whether the five panels (two exterior, three interior – it’s a triptych, after all) hold a common thread, if the images presented are personal or generic. At the end, it retains its stolid mysteries and, for this listener, it was worth hearing. Which you find hard to say after many another (near-) contemporary composition.
The players then moved to surer ground for their elderly audience through Schumann and Smetana. With the Czech master, you have no choice: he wrote only one, the draining G minor commemoration of his eldest daughter Bedriska’s death. As for Schumann,, you have a choice of three, with No 1 in D minor almost always the one that ensembles pick to display their talents. It’s been a long while in my experience since No. 3 in G minor has been played live, so full marks to Selby and her partners for giving it an overdue airing.
For all its unfamiliarity, Schumann’s opening Bewegt makes a compelling argument with a notably compressed set of materiel sources spiced up by unexpected touches as in a couple of Brahms-like hemiolas before the exposition ends, and a marked lightening of the atmosphere towards the end of the development where the atmosphere thins out to fragments and pizzicato. These players, however, appeared engrossed in the movement’s assertiveness and closely-knit temper, Selby having the most to contribute; at a few stages, she would have benefited from a brief fermata to regroup, but both strings powered forward.
Schumann’s piano part has less to offe4r at the start of the following langsam pages, which begin as a benevolent string duet, finely executed by both these executants with a sense of real reciprocity in their linear entwining. Selby entered the argument with something more than simple chords four bars before the Etwas bewgter direction when the keyboard serves as both protagonist and support. Despite an infusion of welcome placidity at either end of this section, the action in these central pages impressed more because of the amplitude on show, the performers fully invested in the abrupt shift to dynamic motion.
You could have asked for more more contrast in the scherzo, especially at the arrival of each trio in C Major and A flat Major, but they seemed of a piece with the rather hefty approach to the main repeated segment which took the Rasch direction as involving punch alongside the requisite rapidity. Both this movement and its predecessor impress as brief intermezzi, compared to the trio’s discursive bookends, but their pairing is yet more evidence of Schumann’s emotional versatility. When it comes to the Kraftig finale, we appear to be in a much more monochromatic landscape where the ebullient main theme is worked into the ground with restatement after reiteration, albeit consistently optimistic. You find few surprises in these pages beyond the sudden appearance of a rapid violin A Major scale 12 bars from the end, and the dominance of the piano contribution which acts as a doubling agent for much of the movement’s progress and in which role Selby excels.
After interval, we heard the Smetana trio which is well-trodden territory for Selby throughout her career across several distinguished trio combinations. Still, there are plenty of potholes along this score’s path; I may be partial but it seems to me that most of them lie in wait for the pianist, thanks to some pages of Liszt-style virtuosity. As well, you encounter swift changes in temperament that test the adaptability of all performers.
Winther took us all on board with the famous G string solo that sets the trio on its tempestuous path. Even more than with the Schumann interpretation, this treatment impressed for its determination in the clinches and the alternating lissomness of line in passages like the Alternativo 1 which in one page moves from insouciance to high-strung elation. Mind you, the tension was high from the start with Selby eventually exploding in bar 17 where the keyboard breaks free from its accompanying function.
Some moments linger in the memory, like Newman’s eloquent statement of the noble second subject in this first movement at bar 43, followed by Selby’s transformation of the first motif across bars 53 to 55 where optimism turns down its mouth in one of those wrenching changes of ;prospect at which Smetana showed such mastery, specifically in this score. And Winther brought his own voice to the mix with that soaring nine-bar solo beginning at bar 55 when a rhapsodic ascent sinks slowly back to earth. Beside all the heroic clamour of protest and tragedy, passages like these come back to life for days after their articulation if the performance has been vivid enough.
A little later, I was taken aback, as usual, by the sheer carrying power of Selby and Newman doubling a formidable triplet-heavy bass line from bar 80 to bar 89 underneath the violin and right-hand piano’s peroration treatment of this same theme. These players sustained the fire throughout the major part of the movement’s development with its fierce, close canons and harsh insistence before the opening returned and the composer worked his material towards that manic G-dominated acceleration to the end.
Just as striking were both the Alternativo interludes during the work’s central Allegro; first, the simple charm of the F Major, then the switch to grinding power at the E flat Major one’s climax in bar 187 where all three players reinforce each other in a slow march fragment oscillating between C Major and F minor, the strings in fierce competition with the keyboard chords through powerful triple and quadruple stop slashes. – a sudden burst of pageantry in this movement’s pervading aura of secrecy and scuttling.
With a few exceptions, the finale belongs to the pianist who sets the running for a solid initial stretch (bars 1 to 118), and Selby shines in these rapid-fire conditions, making the sudden emergence of Newman with a firm lyric all the more striking. What followed was one of the delights of this afternoon in the duet between cellist and violinist at the score’s Piu mosso marking: a fine instance of intermeshing lines blending in excellent partnership. A repeat of the opening ferment, a revisit of the string duet and we arrived at the movement’s gloomy core: a slow march using a fragmented version of the strings’ theme, followed by another frantic presto rush to an emphatic G Major ending which to me offers no consolation, just a gasp of release.
In sum, an event that reassured us of the consistently high standard that Selby and her confederates can achieve, especially when each of them is versed in both the practices and repertoire of chamber music. Even so, this combination proved singularly effective in its work. Yes, there were surface flaws, mainly of ensemble rather than individual miscarriages. But at the end you were swept up in the participants’ enthusiasm and devotion towards this presentation of contemporary, slightly obscure and all-too-well-known music.
O'Connell the Music 