Friday 3rd February 19:30 Ensemble Renard, wind quintet

We are very grateful to the Tunnell Trust for sponsoring this exciting young ensemble, whose recital will open with their own arrangement of five of Mendelssohn’s Songs Without Words. Their virtuosity and expressiveness will be showcased in C20th French masterpieces by Poulenc and Ravel, and intensely emotional works by two of Scotland’s leading composers, MacMillan and Musgrave. Robert Simpson judged Carl Nielsen’s extraordinary Wind Quintet of 1922, which concludes the concert, “the subtlest and finest ever written”: the composer described the mood shifts in its extended set of variations as “now merry and quirky, now elegiac and serious”, which could also sum up the ensemble’s entire enthralling programme.