Teatime Music - Mendlessohn's Octet

With tiers of tenderness and mischief, playfulness and poignancy, Mendelssohn’s elegant Octet for 8 string players is preluded by Borodin’s charming Sextet in a programme that showcases the brilliance of the English Chamber Orchestra’s principal string players.

Amongst the many jewels that were composed in Mendelssohn’s prodigious youth, sits the Octet in E-flat major, written in 1825, when the composer was just sixteen. The four movement work glides effortlessly from elegant expanse, to touching sentimentality, to spry fairy-like music that foreshadows his much loved overture to A Midsummer Night’s Dream written the following year.

Preluding this work is Borodin’s Sextet in D minor, a work that comprises only two movements, the others never having been completed by the composer, but that is full of style, beauty and rustic Russian lyricism.

Tickets £10