Violinist Susie Park and cellist Julian Smiles were pianist Kathryn Selby’s Friends for the fourth tour of Selby’s chamber music series this year, The Game Changers, which opened with Elena Kats-Chernin’s tranquil Blue Silence. Originally composed for cello and piano – but played here in the composer’s piano trio arrangement – Kats-Chernin wrote Blue Silence so her son Alex, who lives with schizophrenia, “can listen to calmness, meditation”. At the work’s heart is a repeating chord progression, similar to the one that brings Kats-Chernin’s orchestral piece Mythic to a close, the opening fragments of which glimmered under Selby’s fingers. Park, whose day job is First Associate Concertmaster with The Minnesota Orchestra in the US, has a sound so rich and dark in the low register, it was a remarkable match for Smiles’ cello as the strings joined, in a lustrous, breathing account of the work.

Susie Park. Photo: supplied

The soft edges of Selby’s piano contrasted with the keener sound from Smiles in Benjamin Britten’s Cello Sonata – written for the great Mstislav Rostropovich after Britten heard him play Shostakovich’s sonata – the interplay between the two instruments hesitant and disjointed at first before...