This concert at Anna’s Farm brings together three works representing very different facets of the chamber music tradition. Gioachino Rossini’s Duo for cello and double bass is a rare and charming specimen, a work that exploits the contrast between the two instruments with both technical ingenuity and characteristic Italian wit. Mozart’s Sinfonia Concertante in E-flat major, K. 364, heard here in an arrangement for string sextet, is one of the composer’s greatest achievements in the concertante form, its two solo voices engaged in a dialogue of exceptional elegance and expressive range.

The programme culminates with Arnold Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht (Transfigured Night), Op. 4, composed in 1899 for string sextet. Based on a poem by Richard Dehmel, the work follows a late Romantic harmonic language pushed to its outermost limits, tracing an arc from tension and confession through to resolution and acceptance. Though written at the very end of the nineteenth century, it points unmistakably toward the musical upheavals of the twentieth. In the intimate setting of Anna’s Farm, the work’s emotional directness can be felt with particular force.