Radiante
Seraphim Trio
ABC Classics
ABCL01111
★★★★★

Hiding behind the name Seraphim Trio are three of Australia’s leading musicians, who have been playing together now for 27 years. Helen Ayres is the violinist, Timothy Nankervis the cellist and Anna Goldsworthy the pianist and together they present unbeatable excellence.  

For their latest recording, through the ABC Classics label, they’ve chosen four works by female composers, a particular genre they have long championed. First off is a piano trio by the late 19th- early 20th-century French composer Germaine Tailleferre, the only female member of that imposing French group known as Les Six. Tailleferre wrote the work in 1978, just five years before her death. She was 86 at the time but the work has the agility and expressiveness of one much younger. The final three-and-a-half minutes, marked ‘Tres animé’, are worth the whole CD.  

But then comes Clara Schumann’s Piano Trio in G minor, and we are treated to more movement and light, though the first movement, marked ‘Allegro moderato’, with its somewhat stern opening, might well have been one of her husband’s. But then Clara suddenly changes tempo and convention by inserting a scherzo as the second movement. The original meaning of scherzo was jest and that is played to the full. All in all, a brilliant work, considered one of her best. 

The 31-year-old Australian composer Elizabeth Younan, who is currently studying for her Doctor of Musical Arts at the Juilliard School in New York, is represented by her Piano Trio. Just under ten minutes long, it is a proficient work that is not entirely out of place in this quartet of female composers, any more than is the Croatian composer Countess Dora Pejaĉević’s Piano Quartet in D minor, which is also illuminated by a lightness of touch, with viola player Stephen King added to the trio for this work. 

This CD presents a most excellent collection of clever female composers who are not performed nearly often enough but are here brilliantly brought to light by an amazing group of musicians. 

Reviewed by Michael Morton-Evans