The concert programme is an incredible mixture of old and new,  A Haydn quartet, a beautiful  piece by American composer David Bruce and dulcis in fundo Brahms’ glorious  clarinet quintet with  celebrity clarinettist Julian Bliss.
Gumboots, written in 2008, is a quintet for clarinet and strings in which the composer looks to Gumboot dancing – born out of how black miners in apartheid South Africa, forbidden to speak, communicated by slapping their boots and chains. After a long opening movement of heat haze, come five increasingly complex dances, reverberating with the smack of wood and bow on string and with the wheeling, almost klezmer-like playing of Julian Bliss, who flits seamlessly between regular and bass clarinet. The joyous rhythmic barrage of the finale could almost be out of a Falla Ballet.