Music in the Round celebrates 20th anniversary of Ensemble 360

Chamber music producer Music in the Round is set to bring its annual festival back to Sheffield in May, with a programme marking the 20^th anniversary of its resident group, Ensemble 360. The 2025 festival will be programmed by the ensemble’s 11 players and is set to run from 16 to 24 May at Music in the Round’s home, the Crucible Playhouse, plus other venues across the city.

Following close on the heels of Music in the Round’s 40^th anniversary last year, the 2025 festival will open with a concert from Ensemble 360 with the premiere of a new work by Aileen Sweeney plus performances of Schubert’s Octet and Huw Watkins’ Broken Consort, originally commissioned for the ensemble. The opening weekend also includes a concert of Schubert’s Quintet alongside Janáček’s Intimate Letters interspersed with readings of the composer’s letters to Kamila Stosslova.

Music in the Round chief executive Jo Towler said: ‘Music is central to the lives of many in the city, shaping our identity and integral to the city’s sense of pride.  Sheffield City Council’s new Culture Strategy places creativity at the centre of the region’s growth. Working in partnership with all our colleagues across the city including the newly-launched Harmony Works, we are thrilled to be at the heart of this vibrant ecology. As Elgar said, “some day the press will awake to the fact that the living centre of music in Great Britain is not London, but somewhere further North.”  Our community’s ever-active dedication to music even motivates audiences to rise at 4.30am for our annual dawn concerts.’

The festival’s dawn concerts return this year with two concerts at the Samuel Worth Chapel in Sheffield’s General Cemetery, presenting Bach’s Goldberg Variations in arrangement for Trio and in the original, performed by pianist Tim Horton.

Ensemble 360 appear throughout the festival, presenting an evening programme of Nono’s La Lontananza nostalgica utopica futura for violin and eight tapes alongside Boulez’s Dialogue de l’ombre and Kaija Saariaho’s Petals and a collaboration with members of the Elias Quartet for four concerts. The Quartet members were all part of the original Ensemble 360 line-up selected by Music in the Round founder Peter Cropper in 2005, and the collaboration marks the first time the players returning to the stage with Ensemble 360 since their departure in 2009.

The festival also presents performances of Ravel’s Mother Goose Suite and Piano Trio  in the composer’s 150^th year, and an evening concert celebrating and contextualising the music of Avril Coleridge Taylor with narration from biographer Leah Broad. Percussionist Dame Evelyn Glennie also makes an appearance, performing Jill Jarman’s Echoes from the Birdcage alongside the composer herself, plus Paul Booth, Ian East and Brian O’Kane.

The Festival culminates with Elgar’s Piano Quintet programmed with Beethoven’s Quintet for Piano and Wind and Mozart’s Flute Quartet in D, in a nostalgic nod to Ensemble 360’s first concert in 2005.