On Monday, 24 October, Lampeter Music Club welcome the Solem String Quartet to open their 22/23 season.

This pioneering group are getting a name for their ability to communicate through music, in any genre, and from any era. Their programme this time will include a piece that only premiered last October, Towards Silence by John Metcalf. This is a dramatic and emotional response to the extinction crisis, variously described by listeners at its first performance as ‘very moving’, ‘amazing’, ‘outstanding’, and ‘spine-tingling’.

The Solem have just laid down a high-definition recording and film of this piece, which will be released in the new year.

The concert opens with their own arrangement of Three Romances by Clara Schumann, the power of whose music has only in recent times gained the recognition it deserves – 120 years after her death!

There follows Henriëtte Bosmans’ colourful, haunting String Quartet, written in 1927, but not published till 1954. Bosmans had to cope with worse difficulties than the ‘concrete ceiling’ experienced by all female composers in the past. When the Nazis invaded Holland, her Jewish mother faced deportation, and Bosmans herself had to keep a very low profile. This gave her time to compose more, but her music only began to be published after the war.

Towards Silence closes the first half on a disturbing, elegiac note.

That is not the feeling people want to take home with them, so Felix Mendelssohn’s String Quartet no 5 fills the second half, raising the mood and delighting the ear.

Organiser Carol Nixon said: “This sumptuous concert exemplifies the extraordinary power of music to heighten understanding, evoke emotion and to console”.

The concert starts at 7.30pm in Lampeter College Old Hall. Tickets are available on the door or online at lampetermusicclub.org.uk