Composer: Berkeley, Sir Lennox (1903-1989)

The Britten Oboe Quartet gave highly engaging and communicative performances of an imaginative and intelligent programme, with cerebral serialism from Elisabeth Lutyens combined with early Elgar, Britten and sublime Mozart to finish.

When a programme is well put together and nicely themed, it is quite easy to turn one’s attention away from the sound of music, and onto the history of music. PCM 4 at Cadogan Hall was breezily introduced by the BBC compere as a programme marking Britten’s centenary, exploring his relationship with his peers, and celebrating his friend Lutoslawski. Yes, it did all that.

The classification of composers into those who write tonal music and those who inhabit the harder-edged shores of serialism and atonality raised its head once again at the first of the three concerts given by the Festival Chamber Orchestra at this year’s Presteigne Festival.

In what was apparently the first appearance from an Irish orchestra at the Proms since the 1970s, pianist/conductor Barry Douglas and the strings of his Camerata Ireland brought a programme to Cadogan Hall which examined Benjamin Britten in the context of some of his contemporaries and friends.

In a brief mid-concert interview for BBC Radio 3, conductor Sian Edwards was asked why Britten and his contemporaries wrote so much music for small string orchestra, and her answer illuminated the choice of programming for this Proms Saturday Matinee performance.