West Riding Ensemble

A month until our season opening concert! Come and hear the lyrical directness of Mozart’s music, alongside an attractive rarity: the op. 1 quartet by Viennese late romantic composer, Walter Rabl, in the beautiful and intimate Upper Chapel in Sheffield. Our lineup includes young WRE clarinetist Sofia. Watch out for updates as we reveal the process over the next few weeks! Tickets in bio.

A year ago on Saturday, Maria played the Mendelssohn E minor concerto with WRE as our season opener. Since then, she has toured with NYO, and has just started her studies at Royal Academy of Music, but continues to contribute to WRE concerts. This year’s season opener sees her sister Sofia take centre stage in two works in our chamber music concert at the Upper Chapel, 7.30pm, Saturday October 10 (tickets in bio) as we begin another exciting, varied, and interesting season!

Come to our season starting concert as we kick off with two well-known works and one little-known composition: in the lovely Upper Chapel in Sheffield! Just under six weeks away!
TICKETS: https://www.ticketsource.com/west-riding-ensemble/wre-salon-transition/e-rprbdz

WRE is looking forward to the new season and preparations are already underway for our first concert of the 2026-2027 season on October 10: two famous Mozart works embodying the unusual and prescient, and a rarely performed but thoroughly entertaining late romantic work by Walter Rabl (1873-1940). Do come to the beautiful Upper Chapel for this lovely programme! Meanwhile, our long-awaited YouTube recordings of Shostakovich and Tchaikovsky finally near launch, and find out more in due course about a new acoustic string quartet project which David, Maria, Charlotte, and George did today!

On Thursday, David, Maria, Charlotte, and George will undertake a ground-breaking historical performance project, recording a movement of a string quartet as recorded by the Klingler Quartet in 1911, as well as a Beethoven quartet movement from their 2025 series of quartet concerts in WRE. These will be made by the pre-electric ‘acoustic’ process, which has been the topic of considerable scholarly interest for the last few years. David and George have been involved with this as performer-scholars for a number of years; in 2024, Maria (who is about to start her studies at the Royal Academy of Music) was, at the age of sixteen, the youngest musician to record by this method since the early 1920s. Here they are in February 2025 making a test recording for this week’s session. The recording engineer is Duncan Miller of Vulcan Records: one of a tiny handful able to do this in the twenty-first century who operates happily in Sheffield!