Cultural Dessert

Regular readers may have noticed that I don’t go to a lot of chamber music concerts: I’m not sure why, because those few occasions I have been persuaded to attend have always been really enjoyable. Last Thursday I made my first visit to Bedford Music Club to hear the Galliard Ensemble – a wind quintet who came to prominence through the BBC Radio 3 New Generation Artists scheme. They were brilliant – precise, delicate, impressive and extremely entertaining. Their programme – inadvertently themed around composers called Paul! – was varied and interesting. We were treated to the world premiere of ‘Pealing Out’, a short celebratory piece written by local composer Paul Whitmarsh to mark the fortieth anniversary of Bedford Music Club. And Paul Whitmarsh was one of two composers in the room (both called Paul!) as Paul Patterson introduced his 1972 ‘Comedy for Five Winds’ which closed the concert. I was interested to hear ‘Kleine Kammermusik’, an early work by Paul Hindemith, but I particularly enjoyed Samuel Barber’s ‘Summer Music’. It was a wonderful concert.