Powerful music played out on the smallest of stages

MUSIC doesn't have to be on a grand scale to be thrilling, moving or life-enhancing.

- By WILLIAM RUFF

In music, as in life, small can be beautiful. And the classical world's name for its small-scale wonders is “chamber music”, written for performance in rooms rather than big concert halls - but no less powerful for that.

The Nottingham Chamber Music Festival is now an established feature on the city’s musical landscape. Its aim is not only to celebrate the vast wealth of pieces written for smaller spaces but also aims to reach deep within Nottingham's creative community.

Festival director Carmen Flores seeks every year to find new approaches, new venues, new artists, new audiences in her quest to demonstrate that chamber music is for everyone.

If the term has ever suggested something thick with dust in a far corner of the cultural museum, then this festival blows all that dust away and lets you see what lies gleaming underneath.

St Mary’s Church in the Lace Market may seem an unlikely venue for chamber music. Surely its soaring vaults wouldn’t deal kindly with the subtle sounds and gestures associated with this sort of micro-music?

In fact, quite the opposite is true; all you need is a little imagination when it comes to layout. And hey presto, an event such as the Villiers Quartet concert on Friday evening became a revelation.

They not only sat in the middle of the nave facing the south doors, with the audience sitting in close semicircles around them - but they were also raised up, allowing everyone to have the best possible view.

This makes a huge difference, especially when it comes to involving listeners in the creative process.

They started with one of Haydn’s greatest quartets, Op. 76, No. 5, a piece that is unconventional, unpredictable and has a wonderful slow movement.

It starts unusually with a theme and variations and immediately in this Villiers performance you knew you were experiencing music in three dimensions and in Technicolor.