LIKE the first cuckoo in spring, the Ryedale Festival launch concert every April gladdens the heart and whets the appetite for glories to come in July.

On Saturday, the flexible chamber ensemble Endymion appeared at St Peter’s, Norton, which has become the festival’s best large venue for purely instrumental music. Familiar Beethoven and Brahms rubbed shoulders with an entertaining sextet by the often unfairly ignored Hungarian composer ErnőDohnányi.

Himself a pianist of uncommon talent, Dohnányi centred his late Sextet in C (1935) around the keyboard, while giving equally challenging roles to a string trio, clarinet and horn. Michael Dussek’s easy pianism was more than equal to the score’s demands, though here as elsewhere the balance between the instruments might have benefited from a less open piano-lid.

But Endymion’s panache exactly crystallised the composer’s jocularity in such a variety of styles that the work almost amounts to spoof. Vivid strings, flexible horn and the veteran clarinettist Antony Pay, no less, brought the finale’s highly syncopated banter to splendid life, after teasing us with the composer’s “wrong note” drollery and false mood-swings throughout the piece.

There had earlier been a sense of suppressed drama in Pay’s initial approach to Brahms’s Clarinet Trio. But he gradually loosened his reins, allowing the music’s ebb and flow to achieve full flood by the close. Similarly, at the start, Clara Biss’s violin eventually found a smooth relaxation in Beethoven’s “Spring” Sonata. Roll on July!

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