LUMAS Winds, an award-winning quintet of young woodwind players, comes to Dorset and Somerset from Friday 19th to Sunday 21st July for a Concerts in the West series. The programme ranges from an Afro-Cuban concerto by Valerie Coleman, to Six Bagatelles by Gyorgy Ligeti.

Lumas Winds will be at Bridport Arts Centre on Friday 19th July for the regular coffee concert, at 11.30am, and Ilminster Arts Centre that evening at 7.30pm, Crewkerne Dance House on Saturday 20th at 7.30pm and St Peter’s Church, Shaftesbury on Sunday 21st at 3pm.

Based in London, this dynamic young chamber ensemble won the 71st Royal Over-Seas League Mixed Ensemble Prize in 2023,. They are committed ambassadors for wind chamber music and the rich variety of repertoire that it offers. The ensemble are Making Music’s Phillip and Dorothy Green Young Artists and earlier this year had a residency at Aldeburgh as Britten Pears Young Artists.

The musicians are Beth Stone, flute, Chris Vettraino, oboe, Benjamin Hartnell-Booth, French horn, Rennie Sutherland, clarinet, and Florence Plane, bassoon. As well as the Coleman and Ligeti, Lumas Winds will play a quartet by Dvořák, Shostakovich’s Suite for Wind Quintet, John Blackwood McEwen’s Under Northern Skies and a wind quintet by Carl Nielsen.

Alongside classics of the repertoire Lumas enjoy exploring works not currently in the canon but which they believe deserve to be so. This is highlighted in the six hidden gems featured on their 2023 debut album, which brings together repertoire from every decade from 1960 to 2010, including three world premiere recordings of music by Sally Beamish, Gavin Higgins and Elizabeth Maconchy.

Lumas won the Royal Academy of Music’s Historical Women Composers Prize in 2022 with its performance of the latter, a major discovery from the ensemble’s visit to the Maconchy archive at St. Hilda’s, Oxford.