Mavericks Feature in Selby & Friends’ Winter Tour

Selby & Friends’ winter tour Mavericks features music by a Grammy award-winning English composer, an icon of France and a national symbol for the American feminist movement. Kathryn Selby AM and her preeminent guest artists, violinist and SSO Concertmaster Andrew Haveron, and ACO Principal cellist Timo-Veikko Valve, tour with piano trios by three composers whose activist rigour and individualism made them mavericks who not only carved out a significant place in music history but paved the way for many who would follow.

Selby & Friends Mavericks tours to Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, Canberra and two NSW centres, Turramurra and the Southern Highlands as well as to Sydney, between 4th to 11th July.

All contemporaries of each other, these composers were each a force to be reckoned with. American Amy Beach, who vigorously pushed back against disparaging comments made about “women in music” at the end of the 19th century, went on to become a national symbol of women’s creative power. Ravel, one of France’s greatest composers, went against the establishment and public expectations and carved out an unmistakable and individual style fusing classical modes with modern jazz elements. The great Englishwoman Dame Ethyl Smyth, whose music earlier this year won the first-ever Grammy to be awarded to a historical woman composer, was championed and admired by Dvořák and Brahms, and later in life made her mark on women’s history as an energetic member of the burgeoning suffragette movement.

The program: Amy Beach – Piano Trio Op. 150 (1938)/ Maurice Ravel – Piano Trio in A minor (1914)/ Dame Ethel Smyth – Piano Trio in D minor (1880)

Also in Sydney 11 July – Turramurra Uniting Church, 2.15pm