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REVIEWS AND PHOTOS
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“Trio gives life to music of composers
who died young”
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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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Review from The Age 26/08/08 Written by Clive O’Connell
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"Trio's concerted effort for charity"
Anima Mundi is the latest in the family of local chamber music groups and has the normal piano trio format but its members are very familiar faces. Pianist Kenji Fujimura is well remembered from his days at the Australian National Academy of Music; two years ago in St. Michael's Uniting Church he collaborated with Elizabeth Sellars in a lengthy cycle of Mozart violin sonatas.
Violinist Rebecca Chan is also an ANAM graduate and regularly appears in the ranks of the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra and Australia Pro Arte. Miranda Brockman, part of a productive musical family, is a regular face in the MSO's cello desks.
They have come together to present three concerts this year to raise money for charities: health and sanitation in Papua New Guinea; Ballan District Health and Care, a reading program at Bacchus Marsh run by the Smith Family and Royal Children's Hospital; and the Activate leadership programs for Melbourne's disadvantaged youth.
As expected, the players moved into a solid, professional working relationship right from the opening to the Brahms Piano Trio No.1 in B Major, Fujimura keeping a cool head in dealing with the voluminous riches of the keyboard line. Even so, this turned out to be a generous realisation, Chan and Brockman giving full measure to the sumptuous string duets that surge out with heartfelt magniloquence in three of the four movements.
One of the trio's aims is to resurrect the music of a forgotten generation of pre-Walton British composers: Stanford, Hurlstone and Ireland feature in later programs but on Sunday the group played Frank Bridge's Phantasie
Trio No.1, a one-movement work packed with arresting motives and a strong lyrical flow that made an exemplary pendant for the Brahms work. Written in a mobile circular form, the work shows a keen awareness of its instrumental possibilities, and its harmonic language has a directness and fluency that make you wonder about its neglect.
While the piano has its fair share of labour in the Bridge work, in the Saint-Saens Trio No.2 Fujimura was put to full stretch, particularly in the voluble outer Allegro movements, while the strings enjoyed the easy lilt of the even-numbered inner movements, dances with more than a hint of the cabaret about them but giving Chan's left hand a good deal of exercise.
Not the most demanding music in the repertoire, this happy rarity, stacked with bonhomie despite its minor key, brought the Soul of the World trio's first Melbourne outing to an effervescent conclusion.
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Review from The Age 29/04/08
written by Clive O’Connell
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