ILKLEY Concert Club is looking forward with pleasure to its upcoming 76th season, which starts in October.

After the complications imposed by the pandemic, which saw members first of all offered online recitals and later invited to choose between two separate socially-distanced concerts, we are anticipating returning to a packed Kings Hall for a series of first-rate concerts.

These will include visits from Ilkley favourites, such as the Brodsky Quartet, now in their 50th year; the clarinettist, Michael Collins; the baroque violin virtuoso, Rachel Podger; not to mention members of the Sheffield-based Ensemble 360.

As well as old favourites, there will be innovations: one programme is devoted entirely to music by women composers and another to music in tango style.

The season rounds off in May with a rarity – a recital for four hands at two pianos.

Our first concert, on October 5, will feature the Brodsky Quartet with British cellist and former BBC Young Musician of the Year, Laura van der Heijden.

The quartet will open the concert with a Bach arrangement and then, in contrast, play Shostakovich’s deeply personal eighth string quartet, which the composer intended to be his last. Combining with Laura, the Brodskys will then play what was Schubert’s last chamber work, his sublime string quintet in C.

The November concert will feature the Marsyas trio on flute, cello and piano with a programme featuring trios by Louise Farrenc and Fanny Mendelssohn-Hensel, as well as pieces by more modern composers.

This is followed in December by a concert with the largest number of players the club has seen on stage for some years. Thirteen players from London Winds, directed by Michael Collins, will perform Mozart’s Serenade K361, by turns delightful and profound, preceded by other wind band pieces by Mozart and Beethoven.

The first concert of 2023 will be a novelty for concert club audiences as we introduce the music of Astor Piazzolla and his contemporaries played by the London Tango Quintet. Their line-up of violin, guitar, bass, accordion and piano is typical of the bands that played dance music in the bars of Buenos Aires in the first half of the last century. This concert should set the audience’s feet tapping, even if they can’t get up and dance.

February brings a concert with smaller forces – a string trio – Ben Nabarro (violin), Rachel Roberts (viola) and Gemma Rosefield (cello) will play divertimenti by Beethoven and Dohnányi, as well as a recent string trio by British composer and pianist, Huw Watkins.

A different tradition of string playing will be featured in the March concert when the Consone Quartet, recent graduates of the BBC New Generation Artists scheme, will perform, on historically authentic instruments, quartets by Mozart and Mendelssohn, as well as, more unusually, Fauré’s string quartet.

In April we welcome Rachel Podger and the vocal group Voces8 with their joint project – A Guardian Angel – which combines choral music from across the ages with baroque violin music, the whole woven around the solo violin passacaglia by Biber which gives its name to the programme.

This will be a truly memorable evening of music making only equalled by our final concert in May. For this Noriko Ogawa and Peter Donohoe will play a programme of French two-piano music, including Ravel’s dramatic La Valse, rounded off with Rachmaninov’s Symphonic Dances.

Concert club concerts are held in the King’s Hall on Wednesdays at 8pm. The brochure and application form for the 76th season is now available from Ilkley Tourist Information Office and, over next week, at Booth’s Store Ilkley; or you can phone 01943 608585 for a copy.

Season tickets applications need to be submitted as soon as possible and by July 16 at the latest.