Two pianists followed, playing widely contrasting works: Anastasia Gould tackling Ravel's impressionistic Jeux d'Eau with atmospheric finesse followed by Zev Sebastian playing the first two movements of Beethoven's Sonata No. 8 in C minor, op.13, 'Pathetique', which was written in 1798 when the composer was 27 years old. The enthusiastic applause clearly indicated the audience would have liked to hear the last movement as well.

Max Bruch's famous Kol Nidrei, op.47 for cello and piano was sensitively played by Ivanna Oliinyk and the concert was brought to a superb end by Shlomi Shahaf's virtuosic rendition of the Adagio and Fugue from JS Bach's Violin Sonata No.1 in G minor.

All in all, a fitting end to our first full post-Covid season, and the presence of performers from both Russia and Ukraine lent a poignancy to the event, showing once more that music transcends national boundaries.

At her solo recital on November 16, she played Bach's Partita No. 1, the first of a set of six keyboard suites composed between 1725 and 1731.

The concert's second Bach work, his Fifth French Dance Suite, also dated from the 1720s. It is regarded as the most cheerful of his six French dance suites.

Verona then performed two miniatures by George Enescu, one of the greatest musicians that Romania has produced.

She also performed eight other miniatures to introduce her audience to the music of Romanian composers of the 20th and 21st century who are less well known than Enescu.

Beethoven's opus18 quartets were written between 1798 and 1800, at the end of his early period, which ended in 1799/1800 with the Septet op.20. This period was characterised by developments and experiments in many forms that had been pioneered by Haydn and particularly Mozart: piano trios, string trios, eleven piano sonatas, a horn sonata, three violin sonatas, two cello sonatas, a string quintet, six string quartets, a piano & wind quintet, and two piano concertos Tonight's quartet was published in 1801 and dedicated, like the rest of the op.18 set, to his noble friend and patron, Joseph Franz von Lobkowitz. It is actually the second string quartet that Beethoven composed and consists of four movements, all of which are in C minor or major. The first has a strong sense of forward propulsion given by the cello's repeated quavers, contrasting with a more lyrical second subject that stlll has the uneasy quavers as accompaniment. But, as the late Dr Robert Simpson writes "by far the most serious part of this quartet is the so-called minuet, having the urgency of some of Beethoven's later scherzo movements (which incidentally when they were not humorous he never called "scherzo" or "joke"). This dramatically intense "minuet" has some remarkable chromaticisms, and the finale is one of Beethoven's rare excursions into the Hungarian style of which Haydn was fond; it is a simple rondo with a contrasting much broader second theme. At the end, the tempo increases and unlike Haydn in such cases, Beethoven allows the minor key to persist to the end.