Brighton Year-Round 2026
The Regent’s Wind Quintet Recital St Nicholas Church, Brighton
The Regent’s Wind Quintet
Genre: Live Music, Music
Venue: St Nicholas Church, Dyke Road, Brighton
Festival: Brighton Year-Round
Low Down
It’s wonderful to welcome back The Regent’s Wind Quintet to St Nicholas. Today shortly after International Women’s Day they bring an all-women composers programme.
Memorable and a salutation to all such brilliant women composers.
Review
It’s wonderful to welcome back The Regent’s Wind Quintet to St Nicholas. Today shortly after International Women’s Day they bring an all-women composers programme. Some known and several discoveries. Connected to the Royal Academy of Music, and extremely busy round national venues, the group’s members hail from Norway, Italy, Spain and the UK.
Flautist Chiara Guijarro Grela, oboist Grace Tushingham, with clarinetist William Hammond. Runa Kosberg on horn and bassoonist Francesco Di Matteo run through a mainly contemporary duo of composers. They then delve earlier, alternating older with one well-known newish work. They also introduce engagingly with the audience.
First was American composer and flautist Valerie Coleman (b. 1970) with her upbeat Umoja which is quite well known. It acts as an overture to the dark-hued and modernist Wings Whispers of 2022 by the contemporary Belarusian Nina Siniakova (b. 1974): rappings and other extra-instrumental effects are required at the end by this tenebrous and questing work. There’s a searching chromatic harmony, post-romantic to a degree, though clearly a work absorbing the kind of expressive grab-bag and gestures you see in older composers of the region: like Ukrainian Valentyn Silvestrov, or Georgian Gia Kanchelli. Siniakova is a huge force on Belarus and should be better-known here. Wings Whispers repays hearing again.
Norwegian Pauline Hall (1890-1969) had her work Suite for Wind Quintet premiered in Norway in 1945, so a personal connection as Kosberg affirmed when she introduced the piece. It’s a typically attractive neo-classical multi-movement work from the mid-century, not out of place in the repertoire or sonority of Lars Erik Larsson or Dag Wiren. There’s attention to chippy wind writing, but also a poise and care for classic sonorites that are clear, clean and bright. It deserves equal billing in such company. There is though a smiling Gallic humour that more than nods towards that lover of wind quintets, Jean Francaix (1912-1997). He’s in turn the love-child as it were of the post-First War French group round Eric Satie, Les Six; and even Les Six members themselves: Georges Auric (imported to score Ealing comedies) and remotely, Francis Poulenc. From all tht and the neo-classicists above you’ll get some idea of how Hall sounds. Memorable and pithy, with comedic parts for not just the bassoon, it’s a work to delight in a d wink at. It winks the more it goes on. Till a sentimental sarabande…. And that’s quite a surprise.
Amy Beach (1867-1944) is now receiving her due. Not before time. Her late work written at the McDowall Colony for composers is far more experimental and forward looking than her earlier music. Her late Piano Trio Op 150 is well known, but this 1941 Pastorale Op 151 is a small gem. Melancholic, with diffracted parts for the instruments to sound inordinate and alone (particularly the flute) this work is a real gem. The following perky movement is full of jarring with not out of place in Hindemith. But more melodically graceful.
Sally Beamish (b.1956) composer and violist is one of the best-known composers writing in Britain. Her The Naming of Birds from 2000 is an example of her relaxed style: Beamish can also write with ferocious address and an easy way to discover her and her orchestral and chamber works is in the BIS label. After her viola was stolen Beamish gave up and concentrated on composition. But her daughter became a luthier and presented her with a new viola. So Beamish is playing again too.
Both recognisably British in some of its modulations yet open to the contemporary world, it starts with a recording if what sounds like a Corncrake! After the field recording the music proper begins in stertorous blasts from all the winds: short breaths announce a birdcall transposed. One thinks of Messiaen above all here.
It soon modulates into a knotty, witty work in several sections, each preceded by a field recording. The next sounds a bit thrush-like. The movement that follows is more melodically profiles, with more graceful interjections with an insistent one chipping into the texture.
A high songbird sound, imitated in an agitated flute and the rest, follows. It ends in a question mark. The finale is darker and far slower in its funereal Adagio than anything preceding it. The next preceded by yet another field recording is a highwire delight with wilder interjections from flute and clarinet. Asymmetrical outbursts soon morph into a skirt if wind instruments. The horn takes this up and the Quintet bops into life in a flourish of fiveness.
Now increasingly recognised, Fanny Mendelssohn (1805-47) is also frequently performed. Her Saltarello Romano Op 6 is a very brightly-lit dance (reminding that he brothers Symphony No.4 ended in a Saltarello). This now transcribed for wind quintet by David Plylar seems as if written for the medium. It’s an amplitude the work thrives on. Memorable and a salutation to all such brilliant women composers it rounds off the whole recital in a cool blaze. They’ll definitely be back.
