Kaleidoscope Chamber Collective join Chichester music series

Formed by artistic director and pianist Tom Poster, Kaleidoscope Chamber Collective is a flexible ensemble with an aim to direct the power of its chamber music making towards bringing people together. For Chichester they will offer Stamitz: Quartet in D major, Op 8, No 1 for oboe, violin, horn and bassoon; Simpson: Nachtstück (2021) for horn and piano; Poulenc: Trio for oboe, bassoon and piano; Clara Schumann: Songs, arr for bassoon, oboe and piano; and Brahms: Horn Trio in E flat major, Op 40.

As Tom explains: “My wife and I set up Kaleidoscope. We dreamed it up in 2017 but we'd actually been talking about it for a year or two previously. We were both doing more and more promoting and curating of concerts as well as performing and we wanted to do something a bit more meaningful. We wanted to do something that had a longer life rather than just a one-off engagement. It was probably also selfishness because we wanted to play the music that we love with people that we loved playing with. As soon as we began to talk about it became very much about bringing together people from different backgrounds and certainly searching out repertoire that doesn't get heard nearly as much as it should do. We only ever hear a tiny, tiny percentage of the repertoire that we actually have. And I do think sometimes audiences are quite nervous about things that they don't know but more probably it is the concert promoters not wanting to put on things that people don't know. Actually one of the things that people say to us most often after a concert when they come up and chat is that they most enjoyed the piece that they didn't know. We are very passionate about trying to extend the repertoire beyond what is seen as the most popular things.”

They had a couple of years before the pandemic and then in March 2020 of course the pandemic hit: “For the whole music world it was a deeply unstable time but in some ways comparatively speaking we were quite lucky. We have always loved dreaming up things and Kaleidoscope really took off quite seriously during the pandemic. We did recording. Recording could carry on. We developed a partnership with Chandos Records. We wrote to them within a couple of months of the pandemic and proposed a programme of music to record and we were very lucky that they said yes.

“In many ways the pandemic was a good time for exploring different things. You didn't have to stick to the popular repertoire just because promoters wanted to put bums on seats because there were no seats to put bums on! And I think that generally the pandemic was a good time for people taking a rather more exploratory approach to what they were listening to. And that has continued in some ways but it is actually a very tricky time for the music industry now. The funding woes in the music industry are generally pretty well known and I think it means that some presenters are thinking that they have to go back to being even more conservative than they were before the pandemic. And I don't think that's necessarily the right approach.”