Canberra International Music Festival / Quintessence, Flinders Quartet and Paavali Jumppanen. At High Court of Australia, May 2. Reviewed by ALANNA MACLEAN.

This was a grand hour in the imposing main space of the High Court.

True, the sight lines in that space are not the best when everyone is on the flat but the audience was there to listen and the concentration was on the music.

You would not have known that this was the first collaboration between Finnish pianist Paavali Jumppanen and Australia’s Flinders Quartet (Elizabeth Sellars and Wilma Smith on violin, Helen Ireland, viola and Zoe Knighton, cello), so assured was the performing.

They started with Shostakovich’s Piano Quintet in G Minor Op. 57 from 1940. This is music that has both humour and authority even  as the composer skirts political repression of the arts under Stalin.

It was followed by a piece from 1952 by the Polish composer Grazyna Bacewicz, Piano Quintet No.1. This was more sombre material but there was still a lightness of touch. Again, here is a composer who had to tread carefully because of the times.

It was a short program running just over an hour, but laying works together by these two composers invited some consideration of the nature of censorship in the arts.

It also gave a large and appreciative audience a chance to listen to some first-rate performance.