Grace Clifford performs with pianist Kathryn Selby, violist Stefanie Farrands, cellist Julian Smiles and double bass player Maxime Bibeau in the latest instalment of Selby & Friends’ online series, Transfigured. She tells Limelight about returning to Australia from her studies in the US as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the joys of playing chamber music again.

Grace CliffordGrace Clifford. Photo supplied

How has the COVID-19 affected your career and schedule?

As with every musician, concerts and festivals have been cancelled – these past few months I was to have been with Queensland Symphony Orchestra, with orchestras in Auckland and Göttingen, and at Kronberg Academy’s Chamber Music Connects the World. But perhaps more deeply than the things whose absence we can see clearly, the time has reminded me that it is in the sharing of music and in communication and connection that music expands to become life-affirming; and that it is in this that we can expand, too. That as much as one loves the solitary hours in a practice room, the unfolding of a score and singing its parts, the feeling of discovery and exploration – it is the giving and taking, the listening...