"ARE you producing as much sound as possible from that quaint and antique drainage system which you are applying to your face?" Sir Thomas Beecham once asked a trombone player.

From which it appears he wasn't overly fond of an instrument he also described as "a sluice pump."

How would he have reacted to four of them lining up at Upper Chapel tonight is anyone's guess.

The all-female trombone quartet Bones Apart have been lining up since 1999, when four players got together at the Royal Northern College of Music.

There have been three personnel changes since then, first Lorna McDonald and last year the BBC Symphony Orchestra's principal trombone Helen Vollum joined founder members Becky Smith and Jayne Murrill.

The group, variously playing alto, tenor and bass trombones, have been extremely successful and are recognised across Europe and in America through concerts and masterclasses.

The aim has always been to raise the profile of the instrument and demonstrate its versatility by means of commissioned works and arrangements of existing music for solo trombone quartet, which is next to non-existent – there is one in Beethoven's corpus, Three Equali.

A large part of Bones Apart's activity is at summer brass festivals (in Spain, Finland and Sweden this year) and, with engagements for a trombone quartet not exactly rolling in, its members pursue playing careers away from the quartet, chiefly on a freelance basis.

After tonight's Music in the Round 'Shakespearean' concert, in the immediate future, they have a further nine up to next May, seven of them playing the same programme on MitR's Around the Country tour.

Stylistically, it's a very wide-ranging programme, a suite from Gounod's opera Romeo et Juliette rubbing shoulders with a selection from Leonard Bernstein's New York version of the play, West Side Story.

There is a further suite from Mendelssohn's A Midsummer Night's Dream and individual items from Walton's Henry V, Touch Her Soft Lips and Part, and the Fanfare from Debussy's projected incidental music for King Lear.

Two of the original works are Timothy Jackson's Four Songs from Romeo and Juliet and Jason Carr's Poem Unlimited, while a jazz set includes music by Cole Porter (from Kiss Me Kate) and Duke Ellington, Such Sweet Thunder, one of a number of Shakespeare pieces that he co-composed with Billy Strayhorn.

Yesterday, after a sampling of their MitR 'Shakespearean' programme in the Winter Garden at lunchtime, the quartet visited Sheffield Childrens' Hospital to launch a series of interactive workshops on the wards, a project that has been made possible by a bequest in a will to the Lindsay Foundation which supports Music in the Community, the education and outreach wing of Music in the Round.


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