The final concert in the Australian Festival of Chamber Music’s Sunset Series, which brought together three works inspired by Jewish music, was an absolute cracker.

Yura Lee in Baroque Around the Clock at the Australian Festival of Chamber Music. Photo © Andrew Rankin

Klezmer Connections opened with Shostakovich’s Second Piano Trio, written in memory of his friend Ivan Sollertinsky who died suddenly in 1944, in a shattering performance by Elizabeth Layton on violin, Svetlana Bogosavljevic on cello and Aura Go on piano. From the icy harmonics of Bogosavljevic’s opening, to the crystalline piano of Go, the trio masterfully handled Shostakovich’s emotional extremes from the aggression that coloured the folk music in the first movement to Layton’s biting violin in the second. Go gave the eight chords of the Passacaglia a monumental power, Layton’s violin sometimes keening, sometimes screaming in the third movement. The final Allegretto is where Jewish influences are most readily heard, in a movement whose bitterly ironic capricious moments are transformed into a howl of grief and rage, the sound of Bogosavljevic’s cello practically serrated before the return of the devastating passacaglia.

The emotional intensity only increased in a performance of Ernest...