The Britten Sinfonia is one of the UK’s best regarded chamber ensembles — renowned both for the quality of its playing and for its innovative programmes. Its performance last Friday was characteristically polished. Britten’s arrangement of Purcell’s Chacony in G minor opened the evening. Britten loved Purcell’s music and made many arrangements of his works. This is perhaps the best known, a tapestry of elegant harmonies, adroitly and simply realised.

Britten’s own Phantasy Quartet Op. 2 followed. The music begins with a ghostly march, introduced by the cello. Echoes of the English pastoral style are heard but so are troubling passages of a strange, dreamlike character. The ensemble captured nicely the dark, mysterious undertones. The piece ends as it began.

Richard Strauss’s Prelude to his final opera Capricccio concluded the first half of the programme. In the opera the prelude represents the performance of a sextet, the subject of the opening scene, and is sometimes played as a stand-alone piece, as here. This is luxuriant and self-indulgently Romantic music which the players performed with feeling.

The second half of the concert opened with John Woolrich’s Quiddities, a work written in 2005 for Nicholas Daniel, oboist with the Britten Sinfonia. Woolrich is a respected composer whose work is regularly performed both here and abroad. In the notes Woolrich mentions the image of a swimmer in a lake and the piece does seem to undulate with gentle overlapping phrases occasionally broken by pizzicato passages on the violins, against which Daniel’s oboe provided a contrasting series of questioning forays; again impeccably played.

The final work, Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht (Transfigured Night) was written in 1899 under the influence of Wagner. As in the other pieces in the concert the sound textures are of otherworldliness, of night and dreams. This was a taut, passionate and haunting performance, rounding off a superb evening.

The Britten Sinfonia appear regularly in London: http://www.brittensinfonia.com/