Gildas - Christopher Jones,Gemma Sharples Violins, Kay Stephen viola, Ann Menzies cello

Aurea - Philip Brett, Rosemary Attree violins, Christine Anderson viola , Abby Hayward cello

Two emerging young award winning  quartets play the youthful and joyous Octet written by Mendelssohn at the precocious age of  sixteen, an extraordinary achievement that has given delight to audiences for many years.  The Octet is preceded by Richard Strauss’ romantic and elegiac opening to his opera Capriccio and by the Sextet by Korngold , a composer that has not been played at Kelso in the past.

The Gildas Quartet are Passionate performers of a hugely diverse repertoire, have workedwith both Colin Matthews and Sir Harrison Birtwistle on performing the composers' most recent string quartets at London’s Southbank Centre and The Forge. The quartet performed live via video link in New York's Carnegie Hall for the American Composers' Orchestra, giving the world première of Ray Lustig's 'Latency Canons' which received a glowing 4-star review in the New York Times . In larger chamber music collaborations, the Gildas Quartet has joined musicians such as Alexander Baillie, Linda Merrick, the Medici Quartet, Timothy Orpen and Daniel Tong. Ongoing partnerships include quintets with clarinettist Jack McNeill, soprano Raphaela Papadakis and pianist Sholto Kynoch, in addition to a number of exciting projects with the New English Ballet Theatre.

The Aurea Quartet, during the first year they performed together, were finalists in the 1st Sándor Végh International String Quartet Competition in Budapest where they were awarded a special prize for 'outstanding performance' of Lajtha String Quartet No.7. They were also winners of the St Martin-in-the-Fields chamber music prize 2014, and after a series of successful auditions, were selected for the  Enterprise Music Scotland Residency Project 2014-15

 They were recently awarded a place as International Young Artist quartet at the Royal Northern College of Music 2016, and as Young Artists, were invited to Vilnius where we took part in a week of European Chamber Music Academy masterclasses this October