Please note this concert replaces the previously advertised concert featuring the Renard Ensemble
Lumas Winds are committed ambassadors for wind chamber music and the rich variety of repertoire it offers. As winners of numerous prizes, regularly featuring at festivals and music clubs up and down the UK, they have firmly established themselves as a group to watch and have been described as an ‘effervescent wind quintet, lively in their performance style and enterprising in their choice of repertoire’ (Seen and Heard International).
Their debut album, The Naming of Birds (Champs Hill Records, 2024), showcases their advocacy for underrepresented works. Praised by Andrew McGregor as “an excellent and highly enjoyable survey of the British wind quintet” (BBC Radio 3, Record Review), the disc features six works spanning 1960–2010, including world premiere recordings by Beamish, Higgins, and Maconchy. Their performance of Maconchy’s Wind Quintet (1980) also earned them the Royal Academy of Music’s Historical Women Composers Prize.
Currently featured young artists with both the Countess of Munster Recital Scheme and the Kirckman Concerts Society, Lumas made their King’s Place debut in May 2025. They have also been Tunnell Trust Young Artists (touring Scotland in 2024), Britten Pears Young Artists (collaborating with Quatuor Bozzini at Snape Maltings) and Making Music’s Philip and Dorothy Green Young Artists.
Festival appearances include Corbridge, Ironstone, Winchester, and the Lake District, with collaborations alongside Benjamin Frith, Huw Watkins, Lucy and Kate Gould, Ralph de Souza, and Rosalind Ventris. Their 2023 Wigmore Hall debut featured a vibrant performance of Lalo Schifrin’s La Nouvelle Orleans which will form part of their Skipton programme.
Formed in 2018 through friendships in the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain, Lumas Winds continue to present imaginative, eclectic programmes with engaging spoken introductions.
To find out more, see Lumas Winds
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LUMAS WINDS SERVE UP A VARIED FARE
Skipton Music’s 2025-26 season continued with a concert by the wind quintet Lumas Winds, an ensemble based on friendships made in the National Youth Orchestra.
Their programme was clearly designed to showcase the variety of music written or arranged for this combination (flute, oboe, clarinet, horn, bassoon) and ranging from a quintet by Danzi – the “father” of the genre – via the French composers Ibert and Milhaud to the jazz-inflected pieces by the Americans Gunther Schuller and Lalo Schifrin. In such a wide-ranging programme there was much to enjoy – I was particularly taken by the tough harmonies and insistent rhythms of the Schuller suite, and it is always a joy to hear Milhaud in his typically effervescent mood. To add variety there was also a piece for unaccompanied flute, a strangely evocative and moving suite by the contemporary composer Corey de Baat beautifully played by the flautist Beth Stone.
The quintet plays with impeccable ensemble, beauty of tone, and musicianship. I did however wonder whether the programme as a whole was too long – a concert made up of a series of short pieces tends to be less satisfying than one built round one or more major works, unless there is a clear connecting thread. But that is a minor quibble for what was a most impressive demonstration of the potential of this particular combination of instruments.
Charles Dobson
Click here to sign up for Listening Club! Welcome to the Skipton Music Listening Club. Each month, we choose a piece of music which is being performed in that month's Skipton Music Concert and the week before the concert, we meet online to listen and have a chat about it - hopefully with some special […]
