“So polished and passionate are the 11 world-class players of Ensemble 360, pioneering music in the round in Sheffield and elsewhere for the past 21 years, that you’d be grateful enough to hear them in wall-to-wall standard fare. But the Sheffield Chamber Music Festival has been about so much more, featuring special curator-performers… and working with top-class folk from other disciplines. This year’s triple bill of Samuel Beckett, Morton Feldman and the two together with actors Siobhán McSweeney and Jonjo O’Neill will remain an immortal highlight.”

But so, too, for me were the sunrise and sunset concerts in Samuel Worth’s noncomformist temple within Sheffield General Cemetery…

“The programming of both concerts was ideal. Tim Horton, a supremely versatile pianist, was exploring Messiaen’s Catalogue d’Oiseaux for the first time. We heard two of these steroidal birds as well as “Le rouge-gorge” from Petites esquisses d’oiseaux and Le Merle noir with the fabulous Juliette Bausor, also London Philharmonic Orchestra principal; there’s no finer flautist in the UK.”

Bausor’s sharing of the honours brought us more consonant Couperin, Rameau and Telemann (two of the exquisite Fantasias). There was bright respite in Vivaldi’s Cantabile from Il Gardalino and Saint-Saens’s blissful “Aviary” from Le carnaval des animaux…

Horton chose Messiaen’s “Le Loriot” as the big climax, finally coming to rest on the last of many juicy major chords, with even a simple trill at the extreme top end of the register, and the final dazzling was the finale of Martinů’s First Flute Sonata, enlightening us as to a possible avian source for the composer’s favoured reiterated thirds…

…

“The sunset event back at the cemetery brought seven of the Ensemble 360 group together, again with immaculate planning: the slow movement of Weber’s Clarinet Quintet is strange indeed, Pierrot howling at the moon, in a work which is surface Rossini with a dark hinterland… Robert Plane dazzled, and at one point had a startling duet with cellist Gemma Rosefield…

… Horton managed the insanely flamboyant piano writing with his usual fearlessness… it was admirable to have all three of the strings’ companions talk about their chosen works, starting with Adrian Wilson on Mozart’s Oboe Quartet with its high-lying writing, and the most concise and beautiful central movement of the evening.”

…