Music at Paxton: Lumas Winds

Paxton House 24/7/26

Lumas Winds

Beth Stone flute, Chris Vettraino oboe, Rennie Sutherland clarinet, Flo Plane bassoon, Benjamin Hartnell-Booth horn

The five members of Lumas Winds met when they were in the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain, with the ensemble being established in 2018. Ambassadors for the wind quintet repertoire, they explore an eclectic range of music, with, as clarinet player Rennie Sutherland says, audience entertainment their priority.

An arrangement by Don Stewart of Leonard Bernstein’s sparkling Overture to ‘Candide’ certainly fulfils that brief, the witty juxtapositions of melodies and rhythms on six instruments, (including flautist Beth Stone’s piccolo) exploring three of the - often under-rated - musical’s numbers, ‘Oh Happy Day’, ‘Glitter and Be Gay’ and ‘The Best of All Possible Worlds’. The four-note repeated Voltairean phrase ‘Any Questions?’ punctuates this exhilarating overture as it does the whole musical. (Scottish Opera’s filmed ‘Candide’ from 1990 is still online)

Holst’s more sedate early work ‘Wind Quintet in A’ lay undiscovered for many years and only received its premiere in 1982. Its five movements feature beautiful parts for horn and flute as well as the quicksilver playing by all five in the Minuet’s double canon. The players take it in turn to introduce the programme, and Rennie Sutherland explains the change in programme from a wind quartet by Jean Francaix to his ‘Divertissement’ for oboe, clarinet and bassoon, written in 1943. The composer was not a fan of horns and thought an ensemble without one was “less likely to produce disconcerting surprises”. Featuring elaborate syncopation and fast playing by all three, this is a delight for the audience but a fierce workout for the players on a warm night - as oboist Chris Vettraino explains, mopping his brow while introducing Zemlinsky’s 1939 ‘Humoreske’. This short rondo, which concludes the first half was the composer’s final work, contrasting the cheerful main theme with subsidiary themes, the first including a lovely passage for solo horn.

Jacques Ibert’s ‘Trois Pièces Brèves’ are playfully elegant little works, with the central Andante providing a fine duet for flute and clarinet. Elegance was probably not in Ligeti’s mind when he wrote his ‘Six Bagatelles’ in 1953, Beth Stone remarking that if you think these are off the wall, wait till you hear his ‘Ten Pieces for String Quintet’! Tonight’s work has an underlying form – a different number of pitches/notes is used in each movement, increasing from four in the first to the whole 12 notes of the chromatic scale in the last. The work doesn’t sound in the least like an intellectual exercise, though it’s not all spiky and zany either – the third movement contains beautiful melodies over restrained accompaniment. But hold on to your hat for the loud dissonances in the second last movement and the frantic final gallop with the composer’s instruction to play “as though insane”.

We recover from this excitement in the best possible way with a transcription of Bach’s Organ Concerto No 2 in A minor (itself a borrowing from a Vivaldi work for violin). With such a pedigree it’s unsurprisingly a very listenable piece: the bassoonist arranger Mordechai Rechtman giving the bassoon a solo in the gorgeous Adagio where the different instruments intertwine, sometimes taking the ground bass role, sometimes the melody. The concert concludes with Malcolm Arnold’s ‘Three Shanties’ from 1942. The first, based on ‘What Will We do with the Drunken Sailor?’ takes us on various witty variations of the tune before it returns as a sultry tango. The sonorous ‘Boney was a Warrior’ has a good part for the horn, while the vigorous ‘Johnny Comes down to Hi-Lo' has a nice jazzy conclusion.

A very short dramatic encore sends us home with ghoulish laughter. An excellent concert. Glasgow music lovers should look out for the Lumas Winds ‘Netherlee Chamber Music Festival’ in which they collaborate with other musicians in three concerts on 5th and 6th September, including Prokoviev’s ‘Peter and the Wolf’ and Gershwin’s ‘An American in Paris’.