Kathryn Selby, Andrew Haveron and Umberto Clerici to perform at the City Recital Hall in Sydney

Kathryn Selby, Andrew Haveron and Umberto Clerici agree. If their performance tonight at the City Recital Hall is exactly the same as the ones they’ve just given, they haven’t done the best job they could.

Kathryn Selby, Andrew Haveron and Umberto Clerici agree. If their performance tonight at the City Recital Hall is exactly the same as the ones they’ve just given in Mittagong or the National Gallery of Australia, they haven’t done the best job they could.

The three leading musicians will be playing the same music as they did at the other venues. But all of them say it’s the little adjustments, the minor changes in speed or emphasis, that should give each concert its own little spark.

And that comes from being just three musicians in a more intimate musical conversation. In an orchestral setting, where there might be 100 musicians being held together by the conductor, this kind of personal finesse is rarely possible.

“In chamber music the size of the group allows us to have a conversation like we are having here,” Clerici says.

“We can interact with every single element of the music. In the orchestra it should be the same, but because of the size, the lack of rehearsals and the fact there are so many moving parts, it’s very rarely happens.”

Kathryn Selby is the acclaimed Australian pianist who established Selby and Friends so she could play alongside the musicians she most admires.

In this concert series, called The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Romantic, her friends are both principals with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra — violinist Andrew Haveron and cellist Umberto Clerici.

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Both of these musicians arrived in Australia four or five years ago, Haveron from the UK and Clerici from Italy.

“I wanted to meet them both as soon as I knew they were coming to Australia,” Selby says.

“The whole idea of Selby and Friends was to play with lots of different people, and if it works do it again.”

This is the first time Selby, Haveron and Clerici have played as a trio, although they have played together with others before. The program for the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Romantic is Mendelssohn’s Violin Sonata in F major, Brahms’ Cello Sonata No 2 in F major, and Schubert’s Piano Trio no. 2 in E-flat major.

Haveron says every single performance of a chamber orchestra should be different, even if the musical scores are the same.

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“We are always governed by the rules and regulations of the notes in front of us, but we are trying to create that piece of music in the moment, as if we were writing it then and there,” he says.

“The problem is, if you are successful, the temptation the next night is to say, ‘let’s do it again’. But you can’t. Because that is recreating what you did the day before.”

Each night the chamber orchestra must rehearse and make some adjustments.

“If we plan to just change something it makes the whole thing fresh,” Haveron says.

Clerici says a common mistake in the training of young musicians is not to tell them that “the point is not to recreate on stage what you did at home, but to have the tools and enough cards in your deck that on stage you can pick the right one”.

Selby and Friends: the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Romantic, June 28, City Recital Hall, Angel Place, Sydney, standard ticket $78, cityrecitalhall.com