This is a very attractive selection mostly of serenades old and new, and it is when in serenade spirit that the ensemble's performances come off best. They treat Janacek's Mladi a little lightly. It is, of course, a piece entitled and about Youth, but the contained energy, the leaping emotions, the vigour of the music are somewhat dissipated in a performance that seems to operate too charmingly. The rest is delightfully done, with the other modern piece, Seiber's Serenade, coming off excellently. Matyas Seiber was a superb musician, much treasured as a teacher and an idiosyncratic lecturer at London's Morley College, and this piece has a lot of his skill, his high intelligence, his craftsmanship, not least his dry, oblique wit. It does not compromise inventive standards in entertaining the mind.
The two pieces dating from 1800 or so are also splendidly played. Hummel's Octet does very nicely, with a pleasant languor in the central movement and a good lively 'hunting' finale. Better still is the performance of Krommer's Octet-Partita, which is a real tour-de-force. The piece itself is very entertaining, with a running joke in the use of smearing chromatic scales which turn up in unexpected places in each of the four movements. The players take the first movement at a dangerous pace, but with the sense of it being safer to keep the airspeed up: it is a most likeable movement, with a curious development section in quite different mood from the rest. The Minuet has a weird Trio, played here in dead-pan fashion. Of the Adagio, the album-note writes that it would not disgrace Beethoven's reputation. Though not in the least like Beethoven, it is a lovely piece in its own right, virtually an oboe solo and turning towards the end into beautiful, decorative figures. The final Polacca lets fly in conventional but very effective style, and is given a deliciously cheeky performance. There is a fill-up consisting of arrangements of four of Dvorak's Slavonic Dances, which go very cheerfully on wind band. Apart from Mladi, which might benefit from a closer acoustic, the recording has a nice, fresh immediacy.'