Epic Diva
Selby & Friends
Primrose Potter Salon, Melbourne Recital Centre
Wednesday November 26, 2025
(L to R) Kathryn Selby, Elizabeth Layton, Isabella Bignasca, Julian Smiles
This farewell to arms from the Selby & Friends organization for 2025 used a slightly larger format than usual. The program comprised three piano quartets and Kathryn Selby assembled a trio of guests who worked comfortably together with very few signs of discrepant attack across two major works and a home-grown bagatelle. Selby’s violinist was Elizabeth Layton from Adelaide’s Elder Conservatorium, violist Isabella Bignasca on a home visit before returning to a New York fellowship at Carnegie Hall, and cellist Julian Smiles refreshing himself in this milieu after a lifetime with the Goldner String Quartet.
Fair stood the wind for a well-ordered recital, beginning with the occasion’s title work from Sydney academic Matthew Hindson, moving to a translucent Faure, and ending with Brahms’ most substantial chamber work. For reasons that weren’t explained, the order of events was reversed but I’m not sure exactly who gained from this change; I, for one, was feeling well worked over by interval after hearing a solid reading of the Brahms Piano Quartet No. 2 in A Major of 1861. Still, we stuck with it for Faure’s 1887 Piano Quartet No 2 which partly mirrored the German master’s vehemence, and finally came down to earth for the Australian work – originally the finale to Hindson’s Piano Trio from 2007 which was commissioned by the Macquarie Trio (then boasting Selby as its pianist), subsequently transformed in 2012 to this quartet format on a re-commission from the University of Queensland.
Selby set the Brahms score in motion with that willowy oscillation between four-part chord triplets and quavers that initiates the Allegro with deceptive calm, repeated in bar 9 by the three strings. But it took no time at all before the pianist exploded into fortissimo dynamic at bar 27, maintaining a dominance up to the paragraph’s end at bar 37 – and we were well into into the composer’s substantial 120-bar exposition which, as far as I could tell, was not repeated.
It’s not that the movement is convoluted but the material is treated at length with a remarkable differentiation in texture. At times, it sounds like one of the piano concertos, as at the change of key signature to nothing when the piano sets up a bass opposition to unison strings and the effect is of a relentless pounding from everybody. Then, we reach a return to placidity at bar 209 with a slightly thinner texture an octave below where we began, which has a kind of supple inevitability about it that never fails to delight. Still, it was obvious that Selby controlled the movement’s level of address, the strings working hard to make their points across the central pages of contrapuntal interplay.
The pianist is also gifted with the opening sentences to the work’s Poco adagio: superbly shaped lines that the strings eventually get to enjoy at bar 24, from which point we heard some lyrically ideal work from Layton in particular. This was equalled later in a moving duet with Smiles, playing the initial theme two octaves apart from bar 86 on. But the movement’s strength for me lies in its fusion of lines, particularly the powerful F minor outburst at bar 109 with the three strings striving in octaves over the piano’s arpeggios. And then we reach the inevitable resolution back to E Major and the three string lines curving around each other on the path home through Layton’s penetrating trills and E Major scales across the last stages.
For a change, the opening to the scherzo from the strings in octave unison did not come over as weedy/reedy which is an approach you hear on several recordings; just a confident piano to allow Selby a subtle response-repeat at bar 8. Still, you couldn’t avoid the imbalance in dynamics starting with the piano’s bass octaves at bar 80, leading up to an explosive attack at bars 88-9.
The balance improved in the fierce opening to the Trio, in part due to the composer’s giving the string lines some clear air in their alternations with the piano, statement/re-statement continuing pretty much through this segment’s first half. Further, you would be hard to please if you didn’t appreciate the subtle transparency of the forces’ interplay across the soft decrescendo in similar motion of bars 266-276; then, the final stages of this trio where the piano operates by enswathing her colleagues in a decorative reinforcement as the texture changes in stratum from bar 315 to bar 326 through a passage of quiet regret before we return to the scherzo.
It’s an unusually full complex to experience; the analysts point out the employment of sonata form in both parts, scherzo and trio, but it strikes me that Brahms offers us a remarkable fusion of material – not literally, but each segment having enough in common to provide an intellectual and emotional consistency, at odds with the prevailing practice of contrasting the two divisions. This is best illustrated by the lead-in from trio to scherzo where the dividing crack is perceptible but close to seamless; not a passage of high-flying craft but an undemonstrative example of the composer’s power to engage through simple means.
To be honest, the final Allegro often presents itself as a hard-fought kind of celebration to my ears. In this interpretation, it opened with plenty of panache, these players keeping a restrained eye on the accented second beat of fulcrum bars, both at the opening statement and in the communal extension from bars 73 to 78. But then comes that sudden turn into long note values after the rest at bar 142 and the energy drains out of the movement’s forward thrust.
Of course, it resumes its opening drive and episodes of relief and action oscillate for the remainder of the allegro, coming to a concluding lengthy animato: 52 bars of it, although it seems longer, and punchy in dynamic output, not least when the piano operates at ottava alta. It’s a relief to come to the end of this bounding activity which seemed to me to drain the performers, even if they maintained their energetic output to the final bars. You wouldn’t call it a hard-won victory – that would demean the performers’ skill and linear definition – yet the impression I had was of a solid accomplishment rather than a high-spirited completion of the task in hand.
A less insistent voice emerged with the Faure quartet, although the excellent sweep of the composer’s first ten-bar subject with the strings soaring in octaves over the restless piano arpeggio patterns remains in the memory some days after this eloquent interpretation, as does the sound of Bignasca’s mellow voice surging in solo with the second theme, and the eventual interweaving of lines – easily perceptible in this work where the composer gives much of the running (in this opening Allegro, at least) to the string lines.
Selby got her revenge, of course, in the following Allegro molto which is a study in digital evenness for much of its length, a sort of right-hand moto perpetuo complicated by its tied quavers across the bar-line and awkward syncopations when the right-hand moves into octaves. The pianist generated a suitable restlessness, even through the pseudo-Trio interlude where the 6/8 pulse cuts to a sort of fast waltz. Bignasca again came to the fore at the recapitulation-of-sorts, having a turn at the piano’s main theme in an A minor version before she partnered Layton in a vital canonic treatment of it at Letter F in the Hamelle score.
The violist led the way into Faure’s E flat Major Adagio with a firm hand on the opening melody before Layton joined in with a gentle reinforcement and the movement flowered into a fluid nocturne with the composer at his most relaxed with regard to modulations. Later, the finale approach mirrored the veiled power of the work’s opening, Smiles and Bignasca urging through the rise and fall of the G minor melody, before violin and viola took up the theme at an octave’s distance.
Selby observed the prevailing discipline but hit the road with vehemence for her first forte at Letter B, then later at Letter J. These pages always carry the listener along with their rhythmic insistence and the composer’s rapid-fire invitation au voyage, reaching an apogee when the key signature changes to G Major. The players didn’t go overboard in the Piu mosso final page, allowing Layton plenty of room to negotiate the concluding rhetoric.
Not much to say about the Hindson piece. The strings outlined the motif/tune in unison octaves with Selby providing some anchoring chords and semi-florid scale cadenzas across two bars. And then we were off with a boppy piano underpinning that might have come from Michael Kieran Harvey in his teenage years. Bignasca looked happy, swaying along to the syncopations of a bygone era, yet the only player who was tested was Selby whose contribution was essential and unremitting, as far as I could tell. If you like, Epic Diva served the office of showing us how far we’d come over the centuries of Western musical development – a flashy sorbet to wind up another recital from this organization almost full to the brim with solid substance.
O'Connell the Music 