BBC Music Magazine, Rebecca Franks
Four Stars (performance)
Five Stars (recording)
“Here’s a debut album full of integrity and care.”
Lumas Winds is a group of five recent UK conservatoire graduates (lively biographies are available on their website), whose sparky playing lights up these British wind quintets. Flautist Beth Stone notes that the thing she loves most about their ensemble line-up of flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon and horn is also what she hates the most: how different each instrument sounds to each other.
“… they have found a lovely balance between the individual and collective.”
Their repertoire is also well balanced…William Mathias’s compact Wind Quintet makes for a lively opener, including a chattering Scherzo and reflective Elegy. Yet Oliver Knussen’s Three Little Fantasies are in a different league, each exquisitely calibrated, packing whole worlds into their brief, two-minute spans. Thea Musgrave’s Wind Quintet, in contrast, has more freedom and fluidity, a wordless, dramatic narrative across four movements.
Three premieres – by Elizabeth Maconchy, Sally Beamish and Gavin Higgins – add real value to the album… Punctuated with audio of the birds described, including the stuttering partridge and mysterious owl, the brief, characterful portraits in Beamish’s The Naming of Birds are deliciously done. And Gavin Higgin’s After Fallout… is full of intrigue across its ten-minute span, in which energy is sculpted, surging in waves, building in power, transforming into dynamic movement, before dying away to its end.
