“A beautifully turned performance … vividly evocative.”
—The Washington Post

Friday | April 26, 2013 | 8 p.m.

Hailed by England’s Manchester Evening News as “arguably the best ensemble of its kind in the world,” the Berlin Philharmonic Wind Quintet rounds out the 2012-2013 Artists Series. The Berlin Philharmonic Wind Quintet continues to astonish audiences worldwide with its range of expression, tonal spectrum, conceptual unity and uncanny ability to unite five disparate sounds into a collective smoothness.

Listeners and critics agree that the ensemble has succeeded in virtually redefining the sound of the classic wind quintet. The ensemble’s repertoire covers not only the entire spectrum of the wind quintet literature, but also includes works for enlarged ensemble, i.e., the sextets of Janácek and Reinicke or the septets of Hindemith and Koechlin. In addition, collaboration with pianists such as Lars Vogt, Stephen Hough, Jon Nakamatsu and Lilya Zilberstein have intensified in recent years.

The Berlin Philharmonic Quintet, the first permanently established wind quintet int the Berlin Philharmonic’s long history of chamber music, has been dazzling audiences around the world since 1988. The ensemble’s commitment to the wind quintet repertoire is passionate and in 1991 it found the perfect partner for its recording plans, the Swedish company BIS Records, already well known in its own right for its uncompromising standards. The results of this long and exclusive collaboration have received critical accolades worldwide—indeed many of these recordings are already widely held to be definitive or reference performances.