Live online: English Chamber Orchestra: Teatime Music - Mendelssohn's Octet

The English Chamber Orchestra presents ‘Teatime Music’ a series of four afternoon tea concerts, streamed straight to your living room. Pour yourself a cuppa, crack open the posh biscuits, and enjoy a smorgasbord of programmes, performed by the world's most recorded chamber orchestra.

Amongst the many jewels that were composed in Mendelssohn’s prodigious youth, sits the Octet in E flat major, written in 1825, when the composer was just sixteen. The four movement work glides effortlessly from elegant expanse, to touching sentimentality, to spry fairy-like music that foreshadows his much loved overture to 'A Midsummer Night’s Dream' written the following year.

Preluding this work is Borodin’s Sextet in D minor, a work that comprises only two movements, the others never having been completed by the composer, but that is full of style, beauty and rustic Russian lyricism.