Cancelled: Lunchtime Recital - Ibex Brass

Please note that as a precaution against the spread of coronavirus, this event has been cancelled

Presented by the Royal Academy of Music

Ibex Brass is an ambitious new ensemble, formed in late 2017 by ten undergraduate and postgraduate students at the Royal Academy of Music. The group’s main aim is to expand the music for brass dectet well beyond that which already exists, and its repertoire centres around new, bespoke arrangements of canonical piano- and orchestral- works. Ibex Brass prides itself on its ability to give these well-known classics a new brassy sheen, and to encourage listeners to experience familiar repertoire in a new way.

In 2019, Ibex Brass were appointed Chamber Music Fellows at the Royal Academy of Music in London, and also won the annual ‘Worshipful Company of Musicians Brass Ensemble Prize’. Individual members of the ensemble have worked with a number of prestigious orchestras, including the European Union Youth Orchestra, Gustav Mahler Jugendorchester, Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, and London Symphony Orchestra, and the collective talent represented in the group helps make Ibex concerts particularly exhilarating musical affairs. In this programme, the group explores two very different twentieth-century responses to the music of the French baroque master François Couperin (1668-1733). Richard Strauss’s Tanzsuite aus Klavierstücken von François Couperin takes a number of Couperin’s dances and reimagines them as late-Romantic symphonic movements, and Ravel’s Le Tombeau de Couperin takes the typical structure of a Couperin dance-suite and fills it with Ravel’s distinctive impressionist stylings. Both of these works acquire a unique new character when heard vis-à-vis the exciting new medium of the brass dectet.