Press / Reviews
"In performance, the trio displayed a versatile intelligence and totally engaging musicality in their approach to the diverse, and at times challenging, sonic terrain."
- Anthony Lyons Resonate December 2008
"The trio rightly interpreted Lachenmann's work as being about the sonic transference of colour, resonance and decay between the instruments, and they were able to navigate the complexities of the notation to reveal a structural sense overall. This level of controlled intensity was maintained for the work's half-hour duration and the result was a stunning opening performance."
- Anthony Lyons Resonate December 2008
"Rushford's touch is gentle and evocative allowing the beauty and meditative nature of the piece to come to the fore."
- Gail Priest Real Time Arts September 2009
"Liza Lim's Inguz (1998) for clarinet and cello is the perfect opener—both angular yet supple, as clarinet and cello drone slip around each other, their tonalities intriguingly intermingled into an all new sounding instrument. Trio No. 5 (2009) commissioned by the group from Kate Neal, is similarly well suited, allowing the trio to explore high energy, gestural playing, with cycling fragments, replete with dramatic pauses and eruptions."
- Gail Priest Real Time Arts September 2009
"A trio devoted to contemporary music-making, Golden Fur is currently presenting its debut recital series, on Tuesday striking a deft balance between products from the last 30 years and works enjoying their first performances. In fact, the program's bookends comprised trios by the ensemble's pianist, James Rushford, and one of the luminaries of Australia's avant-garde, Anthony Pateras. Both required prepared pianos to balance Judith Hamann's well-exercised cello and Sam Dunscombe's several clarinets, Pateras' Broken Then Fixed Then Broken a terse jockeying of disjunct accents and patterns while Rushford's Palestra revealed a compositional style eager to employ sound sources in a more effusive and fluent language.
In between these sprightly new pieces, each member of the ensemble contributed a solo, Dunscombe performing Salvatore Sciarrino's 1982 Let Me Die Before I Wake with wafer-thin address from the opening soft multiphonics – a high sustained note over subterranean trills – to the final plaintive notes. In obviously intentional contrast, Hamann powered into Kottos by Xenakis, a savage virtuosic oration delivered with plenty of ardor and focused temperament.
The night's major work fell to Rushford in Morton Feldman's final piano piece, Palais de Mari, which generated a benign emotional deliberation through subtly differentiated splayed chords and a lack of theatrics, setting this construction in calculated contrast with the more frenetic surrounds of Golden Fur's challenging enterprise."
- Clive O'Connell of The Age December 2009 (unpublished)