Best of professionals playing like friends

{TABLE} Andante in F K616 ................... Mozart Quintet in D minor Op 68 No 3 ....... Danzi Kleine Kammermosik Op 24 No 2 ....... Hindemith Summer Music ........................ Barber Serenade in C minor K381 ............ Mozart {/TABLE} THE AIB Music Festival in Great Irish Houses moved to a windswept Killruddery on Saturday for the Irish debut of the Berlin Philharmonic Wind Quintet. This group, drawing together five players from the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, was founded in 1988 and offers everything such a distinguished pedigree would lead you to expect in terms of technical polish, intonational purity and musical refinement.

At the heart of their programme were two of the best known wind quintets of the 20th century. Hindemith's Kleine Kammermusik was written in 1922, when the composer, then in his late twenties was still something of an enfant terrible in German musical life. Barber's Summer Music, on the other hand, was a product of the composer's middle years, conceived long after his Adagio had catapulted him to international attention.

The Berlin players captured the deft wit of the one as easily as the light nostalgia and gentle radiance of the other, and they made the most, too, of the lighter offering of Franz Danzi (1763-1826), whose music, although he was a cellist, has retained most strongly the affection of wind players. The performances of all three pieces had in delightful abundance that sense of easy give and take among friends which characterises chamber music at the highest level.

The evening's two pieces by Mozart were both arrangements. The Andante, K616, is one of a number of pieces written for mechanical organ, the Serenade, K388, was originally written for wind octet. The serenade, which also exists in a version for string quintet, was the more winningly presented, but the characteristic timbre and richness of the four pairs of instruments of the original, and Mozart's masterly play with these resources, are by no means reproducible by a wind quintet, not even one as clever and virtuosic as this.