Melbourne’s Flinders Quartet (FQ) has launched its 25th anniversary season, a program designed to celebrate the ensemble’s quarter-century artistic legacy and, more importantly, the enduring power of chamber music.

FQ cellist Zoe Knighton was still a music student in 2000 when she co-founded the ensemble in 2000. “I had a rather utopian idea about what working as a quartet would be like and what my own future would be,” she tells Limelight. “But if I could go back 25 years and show my younger self the future, I think she would be pretty excited.”

Flinders Quartet 2025, Elizabeth Sellars, Helen Ireland, Wilma Smith and Zoe Knighton. Photo © Pia Johnson

The founding quarter was Knighton, Helen Ireland, Matthew Tomkins and Erica Kennedy. Inevitably, there have been personnel changes. In 2012 Helen Ayres and Shane Chen replaced Tomkins and Kennedy. Nicholas Waters replaced Ayres in 2015. The current line up is Knighton, Ireland, Wilma Smith (who joined in 2019) and Elizabeth Sellars, who joined the group in early 2024.

“Each time we’ve gone...