BOHEMIAN RHAPSODY

16/02/2013
Patricia Kelly
Courier Mail (Australia)
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Melbourne’s Benaud Trio players have done a sort of about turn from their acclaimed 2012 debut album of trios by Australian composers, choosing more traditional fare drawn from Slavonic sources for this new disc, and they make a jolly good job of it. They bring to trios by Bedřich Smetana and Antonín Dvořák the same spunk and refreshing musicianship that gave their first disc individual spark and drive. Thankfully, they have discarded the dark glasses hiding their eyes in the first disc cover. In this second program, pianist Amir Farid creates an incredibly assured, dynamic centre to Smetana’s Trio in G minor and Dvořák’s ‘Dumky’ Trio in E minor, with their influences dating back 200 years. Farid and his team, Lachlan (violin) and Ewen Bramble (cello), breathe a tightly unified musical presence that throbs with vitality and sparkles with clarity. Nicholas Buc’s arrangement of Freddie Mercury’s ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ shows the breadth of their artistic vision.