Album Notes

The Camarilla Ensemble is the winner of The Royal Overseas League Chamber Music Competition 2008 and performed at the prize winning concert in May at the Queen Elizabeth Hall on London’s Southbank. Its members met during their studies at the Royal Academy of Music and after graduating held a Leverhulme Chamber Music Fellowship there. This enabled them to research, perform and promote British music which led to the commission of a new piece by Karl Jenkins.

Past performances include recitals at London’s Wigmore Hall, St.Martin in the Fields, St.David’s Hall and Millenium Centre in Cardiff at Bryn Terfel’s Faenol Festival, for CHIKS Charity at Frensham Heights in Surrey and also performances under the auspices of Young Concert Artists Trust. The ensemble has more recently recorded the soundtrack for a channel 4 film animation. Camarilla played at the Royal Academy of Music (RAM) Club, celebrating the music of Sir Arnold Bax and also at the Warehouse Studios in London. Concerti performances include Mozart’s ‘Sinfonia Concertante’ with the RAM Sinfonia and Bax’s ‘Concertante for Three Wind and Orchestra’ with the Sirius Ensemble.

Members of Camarilla were invited to play as principals in The Symphony Orchestra of India, its first ever orchestra of this kind, and have since returned for subsequent seasons.

This recording, Camarilla’s first, marks their interest in performing British wind music alongside mainstream repertoire with three previously unrecorded works. The Urtext version of Holst’s Wind Quintet was until recently only available in a truncated form and J.B McEwen’s Under Northern Skies sadly remained unplayed and unrecorded until Camarilla discovered it in the Royal Academy of Music’s archives. Carl Nielsen’s wind quintet is a staple of any quintet repertoire and in contrast, Karl Jenkins’ CHUMS!, written for Camarilla shows the ensemble’s flair for the popular, contemporary and virtuosic.