It’s fitting that Melbourne’s Sutherland Trio is named for distinguished Australian composer Margaret Sutherland. Over half her compositions are works for chamber ensembles, and she too was a committed champion of emerging composers. Since forming in 2011, the Sutherland Trio has been a regular fixture on the Melbourne Recital Centre’s ‘Local Heroes’ concert calendar, and tonight’s is the first of two performances that constitute the Trio’s own Transcendence series.

^{The Sutherland Trio: Pianist Caroline Almonte, cellist Molly Kadarauch and violinist Elizabeth Sellars}

Kurt Weill’s Tango Habanera opened the programme. This instrumental interlude is from Marie Galente, a stage play written shortly after Weill fled Nazi Germany for Paris in 1933 and began concentrating on works for commercial theatres. It was followed by a new arrangement of Melbourne-based composer and composition lecturer Katy Abbott’s Making Angels (2001), originally written for flute, B flat clarinet, and piano, but reconfigured here for piano trio. This work was inspired by Michelangelo’s series of ‘Prisoners’ sculptures (1521-3) in the Accademia Gallery in Florence – in Abbott’s words, “the raw power these prisoners trying to escape the marble block.” Tense and dramatic, sinewy violin and cello...