ADRIAN Wilson, slowly recovering from a virus that hit him three months ago, was relegated to listening to his 'desert island' music instead of being involved in playing it.
"I'd just got married when I started feeling ill," he quipped after hoarsely announcing that his wife would be covering for him at the concert.
Meet Mrs Wilson, Hazel Cropper, who, against the rest of her family's predilection for the violin, is a
fine oboist in her own right. The evidence was here if anyone wanted it.
With a new flautist, Robert Manasse, sitting in for the absent Guy Eshed, the balance throughout Foerster's Wind Quintet and the Mozart and Caplet piano/ wind quintets was immaculate.
With its occasionally modern-sounding dissonances, the Foerster was an engaging discovery, the skilfully-judged counterpoint in the regularly-encountered five-part writing being cleanly and evenly articulated by each musician. Matt Hunt fabulously delivered a delicious, nostalgic
clarinet solo in the scherzo's trio.
Caplet's work, its bright, French feel being highlighted by its use of a flute instead of a horn, was also more than worthy of an outing if only, based on its performance here, for the first movement's sweeping momentum and crescendo of despairing passion in the following adagio.
Tim Horton was discretion personified then and earlier in the more familiar Mozart quintet, K452, where his shade and light piano playing was beautifully offset against the operatically-inflected wind writing coming from his mellifluous colleagues, especially in the lyrical, legato lines of the larghetto.
A fulsome-toned Debussy Syrinx from Robert Manasse, up high and out of sight behind the organ pipes above the pulpit, completed a high-quality concert.
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