Chamber music past and present as noteworthy for its historical breadth as its polished performance.

Utzon Room, Sydney Opera House
May 10, 2015

The Australia Piano Quartet is a young and enthusiastic group of chamber musicians with a flair for the classics and a finger on the pulse of contemporary Australian music. This concert of chamber music past and present was as noteworthy for its historical breadth as it was for the polished performance that the quartet brought to bear.

The title of the concert was Remembering Gallipoli, though the connection to that most important of Australian historical moments was somewhat tenuous: the link was the post-interval performance of Frederick Septimus Kelly’s 1913 work String Trio in B Minor. Kelly was an astounding (though today basically unknown) Australian jack of all trades (and master of many), with a resume that would garner the approval of any mother-in-law: Sydney Grammar, Eton and Oxford graduate; Olympic rowing gold medalist; pianist for Pablo Casals; composer; and war hero, having been twice wounded at Gallipoli and then dying valiantly at the Battle of the Somme in 1916. If his String Trio didn’t quite live up to his battlefield heroics, the Australia Piano Quartet (sans...