This special collaboration sees three of our faculty members team up with two very distinguished colleagues from overseas. Described by the Los Angeles Times as an ‘extraordinary musician’, Mark Menzies is a member of the LA Philharmonic, and is currently violin and viola professor at the Californian Institute of Arts. The German-born, New Zealand-based pianist Michael Endres has been described as ‘one of the most interesting pianists recording today’ (Boston Globe), and an ‘outstanding Schubert interpreter’ (Gramophone). He holds a Masters degree from The Juilliard School in New York; has won the prestigious Diapason d'Or three times; and is one of only three pianists to have recorded all 400 dances of Franz Schubert.

Composed in 1819 when he was 22 years old, Schubert’s fabled quintet exchanged the second violin for the warmth and richness of a double bass. Probably the popular favourite among his chamber works and best known for the fourth movement’s shimmering variations on the earlier Lied ‘Die Forelle’ (The Trout; from whence this Quintet gained its popular epithet), this evergreen Quintet is defined by a blossoming of joyous conviviality that is unique in Schubert’s oeuvre.