Feel the Magic of Wind Quintet – November 6 – Saint Augustine’s Church

Dr John Galea, as Artistic Director, made a welcoming speech that outlined the resilience of our reconfigured offerings during 2020 that also sees the gradual return of live performances for 2021 in full observance of Health Department protocols.

The programme opened with the effervescent overture to Mozart’s ‘Die Zauberflöte’ where the original’s orchestral character and quality were never sacrificed in the transcription making it a cohesive and inseparable part of the whole overture’s texture. This was followed by the hugely appealing Concerto No 2 by Antonio Vivaldi (RV522) and the arrangement of Quintet No 1 in B flat major by Giuseppe Cambini, notorious for its cheerful and entertaining music that agreeably transmitted translucent textures and tempos. The versatility of the Quintet was witnessed in the eponymous Waltz No 2 from Jazz Suite by Dmitri Shostakovich and ‘Tahiti Trot’ , the Russian composer’s unique and brilliantly humorous take on ‘Tea for Two’ here arranged for wind quintet, and performed with great gusto.

Ottorino Respighi’s Prelude from ‘The Birds’, written in the neo-classical style and based on French and Italian music from the baroque era and represents an attempt to transcribe birdsong and bird actions into musical notation. And so it did! This was followed by Piazzolla’s ‘Libertango’ and Joe Garland’s ‘In the Mood’ that brought this concert to a rapturous close. The Saint Paul’s Metropolitan Orchestra’s Woodwind Quintet captured every nuance inherent in the chosen programme, resulting thus in a highly polished performance of this exciting and challenging genre.