The chamber ensemble Endymion is known for programming unusual works alongside the mainstream repertoire. In the past, their aim has been to stress the links between contemporary music and established classics; at the moment, they are focusing on the music of Thomas Dunhill (1877-1946), whose Quintet in E flat they performed here alongside works by Schubert, Mozart and Brahms.
Dunhill is usually described as a purveyor of "light music" and operetta after the fashion of Gilbert and Sullivan. The quintet, dating from 1899, doesn't reveal any major depths of meaning or emotion, though it's a work of great charm - very English, shot through with late-Victorian spaciousness and optimism, and characterised by instrumental writing of considerable intricacy that permits virtuosity yet never allows one performer to dominate.
Endymion, who always communicate the pleasure they experience in music-making, played it with restrained passion, exposing the gathering richness of colour in the broad, Elgarian set of variations with which the work opens, and tackling the central pastorale-cum-scherzo with flawless grace. If the hurtling finale seemed overlong, that was Dunhill's fault, not theirs.
In its cyclic form, Dunhill's quintet has certain similarities to Brahms's extraordinary Clarinet Quintet. That was performed after the interval, in an intense performance that rightly hovered between yearning and bitterness. The clarinettist, Mark van der Wiel, was immaculate in his negotiation of the thin line between suavity and strident anger on which the work depends.
Schubert was represented by the String Trio in B flat, D471, and Mozart by the Oboe Quartet, K370. The latter is contemporaneous with Idomeneo: oboist Melinda Maxwell was fierily operatic in the outer movements, plaintively tender in the drooping, aria-like adagio. Schubert's fragment - only the first movement survives complete - is very much driven by the first violin, and Krisia Osostowicz seemed to seduce the other two players into action with a fine display of silky, sensual tone.
