“Artless grace, pure innocence, mellow joy, the pain of a tender soul – all these the oboe can render admirably with its cantabile,” wrote Hector Berlioz in his famous treatise on instrumentation. It was the oboist Christoph Hartmann who founded the Ensemble Berlin, whose repertoire embraces classical chamber music and arrangements as well as original compositions. Traditional listening expectations are confounded and the familiar is displayed in unusual garb.

There can be no doubt that the programmes of Ensemble Berlin have much to offer those wanting to discover novel repertoire – for example the Concerto in F major by the English composer Henry Hargrave, who published five “galant” concertos between 1760 and 1765, or works by the young American Andrew Norman, who spent time in Berlin in 2010 as a fellow of the American Academy. But that the familiar can also acquire new aspects is proved by the septet arrangement of three arias from the famous cantata Ich habe genug BWV 82, of which Johann Sebastian Bach himself produced several variants.

The evening will also feature an arrangement of music from Mozart’s opera Le nozze di Figaroby the Augsburg oboist Wolfgang Renz, who has been collaborating with Ensemble Berlin for a number of years. And it will conclude with an 1805 arrangement of Mozart’s B flat Serenade, the “Gran Partita” K.361, by a certain Christian Friedrich Gottlieb Schwencke, the successor of C. P. E. Bach in Hamburg.