The Tarka Ensemble

Lola Frisby Williams is from Devon and first started playing the clarinet when her parents found one in a shed. She is currently in her final year reading Music at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge and has lessons with Christopher Richards at the Royal Academy of Music. She set up the Tarka Ensemble last year as a way to bring the high-quality chamber music she enjoys in Cambridge home to Devon. The group is made up of Tara Spencer (violin), Elsa Chung (violin), Polly Almond (viola) and Ola Kiezun (cello), some of Cambridge’s finest student instrumentalists. Many have been in the National Youth Orchestra and other leading national ensembles, and all play together in Cambridge University Orchestra. Expect a varied programme, with more traditional clarinet quintet works alongside ones you certainly won’t have heard before!

The programme will feature Samuel Coleridge-Taylor's Clarinet Quintet written in 1895 when he was a student at the Royal College of Music in London. He had a fascinating life, described here on Wikipedia.

Here's a performance of the Quintet at the Royal College of Music in 2020, along with an introduction from Colin Lawson, clarinettist and Director of the RCM, plus comment from Peter Linnitt, RCM Librarian. Samuel Coleridge-Taylor's Clarinet Quintet on YouTube.

Featuring - The Tarka Ensemble