Ensemble 360 & Elizabeth Watts – tickets to individual concerts - A Schubertiade

Ensemble 360

Elizabeth Watts soprano

Formed originally in 2005 by Music in the Round as its resident ensemble, to continue the great legacy of the Lindsay Quartet, Ensemble 360 now performs all over the UK and abroad, boasting a glowing reputation for the outstanding quality of its performances, the breadth of its work and its passion for reaching new audiences. In 2023 Ensemble 360’s significant contribution to the UK’s chamber music scene was acknowledged in a shortlisting for the Royal Philharmonic Society Ensemble Award, and their recording “Pierrot Portraits” with soprano Claire Booth, to mark the 150th anniversary of Arnold Schoenberg’s birth, was released on Onyx Classics in September 2024 to critical acclaim in the press. 

With a voice described by International Record Review as “one of the most beautiful Britain has produced in a generation” Elizabeth Watts is “now established as one of Britain’s leading sopranos” (The Guardian). A former BBC Radio 3 New Generation Artist, Elizabeth is much in demand as a recitalist at the UK’s leading venues and festivals.

Franz Liszt dubbed Schubert ‘the most poetic of composers’. Few would disagree. No music seems to speak to us more directly, or more touchingly. Paradoxically, Schubert is at once the most friendly of the great composers, and the one who expresses most piercingly a Romantic sense of separation and ‘otherness’; a creator of some of the world’s most lovable melodies who is also revered for his visionary approach to harmony.

During his short life, spent almost entirely in Vienna, Schubert was known overwhelmingly for his songs and shorter piano works. Many of these were first performed at the parties that came to be known as Schubertiades: evenings of music and dancing. This weekend we hear the ever-fresh ’Trout’ Quintet’ and the sublime String Quintet, beloved of Desert Island Discs castaways, as well as relative rarities such as the C major violin-piano Fantasy and the cantata for voice, horn and piano ‘Auf dem Strom’, composed as a tribute to Beethoven on the anniversary of his death. 

Other perennial favourites in our Schubert celebration include the darkly dramatic ‘Death and the Maiden’ String Quartet and the E flat Piano Trio, with its haunting slow movement said to be based on a Swedish song. No Schubertiade would be complete without a smattering of piano dances, where Schubert raises popular art to a new level of poetry. And if you have eight players on hand, what could make a better ending than the colourful, life-affirming Octet?