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Following its philanthropic path in raising funds for the “Activate” program that helps Melbourne’s young people, the Trio Anima Mundi presented the second of its Melbourne subscription series recitals on Sunday afternoon, playing a program to commemorate composers who died young. Some well-known names appeared in Schubert’s B Flat Piano Trio, a pair of little-heard violin/cello duets by the pre-adolescent Mozart – and finally a Trio in G by William Hurlstone, an early 20th-century prodigy admired by Parry, Stanford and other late Victorian and Edwardian era composers.
In the well-known Schubert work, Rebecca Chan’s clear and surprisingly sweet violin line partnered amicably with Kenji Fujimura’s piano. Miranda Brockman enjoying the St. Michael’s muted acoustic less than her colleagues, if making some telling strokes in the work’s soothing Adagio – a home-spun companion for the Notturno written for this combination and the unparalleled slow movement of the C Major Quintet.
If the Anima Mundi reading missed out on the urgency that became familiar from many versions offered in recent chamber music competitions, it profited from an easy suavity, the dynamic palette limited but put to telling use in the contrasts found during the opening and closing Allegro movements. The small Mozart duets paired simple and short binary movements with a minuet each, revealing yet again the composer’s startling inventiveness where even well-tried patterns find a slightly asymmetrical freshness of treatment.
After his short break from action, Fujimura returned to give firm outline to the Hurlstone trio, written a year before the British writer’s death from bronchial asthma. While all of its four movements bear witness to the influence of Brahms’ shifting textures alongside the bucolic skittishness of Dvorak, the work holds many pages that speak an original voice, as due to the clarity of texture in all instruments as to the bright shafts of light cast by Hurlstone’s cleverly organized harmonic shifts. Above all, the performance gave an attractive realization of finely-spun passage-work allied with a driving melodic energy, showing – if it needed to be demonstrated – the young composer’s accomplished compositional character and solid technical powers
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