Musical gatherings go back millenia, from the oral transmission of folk songs through communal music making to entertainments at eighteenth-century courts or informal concerts in Victorian drawing rooms. A Musical Soirée presents a fresh look at music for the chamber, in a programme that takes the listener from Weimar to London, from divertimenti to songs without words.

The joyful Divertimento by Anna Amalia, niece of Frederick the Great, was doubtless composed for performance at her Weimar court, famed as the centre of Enlightenment culture. It belongs to a quite different world from the twentieth-century Divertimento by violist and Cobbett prize-winning composer Harry Waldo Warner, who reconfigures the Baroque dance suite in his own distinctive style. York Bowen and Susan Spain-Dunk both use the popular violin-viola duo to explore the virtuosity of the instruments and to conjure up different landscapes. Inspired by Nikolaus Lenau’s Schilflieder, poems of love and separation read in translation on this disc by Joanna David, the trio by August Klughardt takes the listener through a kaleidoscope of emotions, while Bel Comeau’s adventurous arrangement of Vittorio Monti’s Czardas is a rip-roaring, riotous party.

This is an eclectic programme in its stylistic and historical range, but for all its diversity each piece suggests an essential characteristic of chamber music. This concert takes the listener on a journey, from an elegant court to the vastness of nature, from the anguish of unhappy love to the exhilaration of a folk dance; it offers a musical soirée which begins in the chamber and ends in the imagination.