Review: Les Vents FranÇais, Queen’s Hall

LES Vents Français might sound like a complaint brought on by too much garlic, but as yesterday’s enthralled audience instantly discovered, it is the collective name of the French-based wind quintet that blew our heads off with knock-out performances, many of them from the richly entertaining French stable of wind quintet repertoire.*****

From the offset – Jacques Ibert’s energetic Trois Pièces Brèves, almost Grainger-esque in its repetitive folkish charm – the electricity pulsed through the ensemble, each player drawing mischievously pertinent attention to himself when the occasion called out. Never a dull moment.

Indeed, that magical combination of individual spirit and collective homogeneity ignited, magnesium-like, the filigree delicacies of Ravel’s Le Tombeau de Couperin (a nifty arrangement of four of its movements by Mason Jones), Milhaud’s charmingly eccentric La Cheminée du roi René and the liquid refinement of Paul Taffanel’s Quintet.

But even in the non-French hues of Samuel Barber’s airy Summer Music and the deliciously flirtatious Humoreske of Alexander von Zemlinsky, fluid and magnetic physicality remained the watchword of these exceptional players.

Without a doubt, a world-beating ensemble for which one can truly claim the glorious whole is hugely greater than the sum of its virtuosic parts.