09/09/2026
We were delighted to welcome the Streeton Trio to Armidale for *Women Who Dared*, a concert that has been extremely highly regarded by everyone who attended.
Dr Robert Manley was among the audience and has shared his thoughtful review of the performance. We’re pleased to share it below.
🎻 **CONCERT REVIEW**
**Streeton Trio – Women Who Dared**
Thursday 3 September 2026, 7:00pm
Armidale Town Hall
The New England Conservatorium of Music, in association with Musica Viva Australia, presented the Streeton Trio at the Armidale Town Hall on Thursday evening in Women Who Dared, a programme of four works by four women. The house was moderate (it deserved to be full).
Injury and unavailability had forced a change of personnel. The trio’s cellist Rachel Siu and pianist Bernadette Harvey both withdrew, and Minah Choe and Ying Ho took their places alongside founding violinist Emma Jardine.
F***y Mendelssohn’s Piano Trio in D minor of 1846 opened the evening. Jardine introduced it warmly, recalling that Carl Friedrich Zelter, who taught both Mendelssohn children, once told Goethe that Abraham Mendelssohn’s eldest daughter possessed something of the genius of Johann Sebastian Bach. The scoring is certainly dense, intricate and flowing, with F***y’s own instrument (the piano) adopting a central role. Ho met its virtuosic, restless keyboard writing with command. Even though the ensemble took a moment to settle, the audience, exhilarated, applauded after the first movement. Choe drew a rich, buttery tone from cello writing that sometimes sits punishingly high, recalling the fingerboard gymnastics of the Brahms F major sonata. Jardine matched her impeccably. The interlocking lines of the Andante were beautifully weighted between all three players. If F***y’s themes never quite lodge in the memory, the finale closed the work with edge-of-the-seat excitement.
Kelly-Marie Murphy’s Give Me Phoenix Wings to Fly transformed the evening. Driving rhythms, hard accents and reciprocal group syncopations recalled inflections from The Rite of Spring, and rising cello octaves cut through with startling clarity. The first movement ends on the lowest note of the piano and runs without a break into the second, where artificial harmonics, sul ponticello and isolated trill fragments pass between violin and cello. Choe and Jardine commanded these colours completely, and Ho’s pianissimo touch was captivating. The third movement returned to relentless driving rhythms. It made a bold and riveting close to the first half.
After interval came Elena Kats-Chernin’s Spirit and the Maiden. Jardine told the Russian tale behind it, of a girl, a water spirit, a dance, a drowning and a transformation into a lily (its macabre turn drawing laughter from the hall). The music is tonal and fluid, coloured by aspects of pentatonic writing and restless harmonic shifts. The subject is imaginative and the writing charming, though beside the Murphy it sounded more like a commission fulfilled than a truly poignant work of imagination.
Clara Schumann’s Piano Trio in G minor concluded the programme and proved the finest music of the evening. Clara wrote it in Dresden between May and September 1846, through husband Robert’s declining health and the loss of a pregnancy, and she intended to dedicate it to F***y Mendelssohn. F***y died before the printer returned it, and thus the trio was published with no dedication at all. The kinship between these two Romantic composers, and the few months separating their trios, might have been drawn out more thematically in the programme.
From the first movement, the sense of balance within phrases and the economy of harmonic construction invite parallels with Robert; the Andante, which Jardine named her favourite, unfolds in long hymn-like lines over piano arpeggiations; the fugal finale, which Felix Mendelssohn singled out for praise, is dense and Germanic yet lit by an almost Elgarian breadth of melody. Here the three sounded settled, uniform in colour and intent. Where F***y’s trio can feel like a concerto with eight additional strings attached, Clara’s is true chamber music, its material shared equally between the players. It is serious, academic, and lyrical at heart.
This was a concert whose music needed no advocacy. It made its own case, and made it well. Three smaller observations remain. To this critic’s ear, and despite Herculean technical feats from each player, violin and cello bound more tightly to each other texturally across the evening than to the piano. Jardine spoke before every work, yet sharing that duty would lend the audience insight into the inspirations of all the musicians on stage. And with personnel turning over repeatedly and one founding member now remaining, one might fairly question the Streeton Trio branding. None of it weighs much against the substance and intent of the programme, which was delivered with fiery aplomb.
**Dr Robert Manley**
