The award-winning Mēla quartet, known for their ingenious arrangements of orchestral works, perform a mixed audience-friendly programme.

Programme:

Camille Saint-Saëns Bacchanale from Samson and Delilah arr. Bovey

Claude Debussy Deux Arabesques arr. Tarlton

Phillip Houghton Opals (1995)

Maurice Ravel Pavane pour une Infante Defunté arr. Robinson

Mikhail Glinka Ruslan and Ludmilla Overture arr. Tarlton

Interval

Wolfgang Mozart The Marriage of Figaro - Overture arr. Tarlton

Laura Snowden My Clock is Broken! (2019)

Darius Milhaud Brazileira from Scaramouche arr. Robinson

Brubeck/Desmond Brubeck Suite

Claude Debussy Clair de Lune arr. Tarlton

Bizet/Goss Carmen Fantasy

Segudilla

Gypsy Song

"The Mēla quartet play my work Opals with brilliance and poetry. The music shines and shimmers with sparkling clarity...wonderful music making!" Phillip Houghton, Composer

The Mēla Guitar Quartet takes their name from the Sanskrit word for ‘Festival’. Their concerts celebrate an engaging and imaginatively wide-ranging programme of original pieces for guitar quartet and their own ingenuitive arrangements.

The quartet formed in 2015 as graduates of the Guildhall School of Music and Drama and the Royal Academy of Music. They quickly became International Guitar Festival Young Artists 2015/16, then Park Lane Group young artists 2018/19 and Royal Over-Seas League chamber music finalists 2019.

The quartet's recordings have received critical acclaim, while notable performances have included the Southbank Centre’s Purcell Room, Kings Place Hall One, Barbican Centre’s Milton Court, St. George’s Bristol and Westminster Abbey.

In 2019 the quartet embarked on an 8 concert tour of China, including Shanghai Oriental Arts Centre, Changsha concert hall and Tianjin Grand Theatre.

The quartet are enthusiastically adding to the guitar quartet repertoire through their adventurous arrangements of much loved orchestral works and their commissions of new music, including My Clock is Broken! by Laura Snowden, which is being performed this evening.