In keeping with this year’s SICMF focus on women (and in particular women of colour), Alisson Loggins-HULL Hammers for flute and percussion trio promises six minutes of curious interest. Balakirev is one of the lesser-known Russian nationalist composers whose octet combines sonorities of strings, woodwinds and piano in lush Russian Romantic writing. Ravel’s Mother Goose Suite has been reduced from its full orchestral original to a piece of chamber music where the subtleties of French impressionism are perhaps even more clearly portrayed. Mendelssohn’s youthful quintet no 1 was written just after the more famous octet when he was just 17 years old.
