Luigi Boccherini’s Las Parejas Flute Quintet makes for a brilliant curtain raiser, with its fanfare opening in the strings – apt music to kick off period outfit the Australian Haydn Ensemble’s 2020 season.

The Australian Haydn Ensemble’s Emperors & Armies. Photo supplied

The sixth Quintet in the Italian Boccherini’s Opus 19 set, written in 1774, takes its title – ‘The Couples’ – from Spanish horse racing, the composer having moved to Spain in the late 1760s at the invitation of the Spanish Ambassador. Sandwiched between the fanfare Entrada-Marcia movements – the marches adorned with festive flute trills – the central Galope more than lived up to its name in the hands of this quintet, comprising Skye McIntosh and Matthew Greco on violin, James Eccles on viola, Anton Baba on cello and Melissa Farrow on flute.

Haydn’s String Quartet No 62, Op. 76, No 3, has been dubbed The Emperor for the composer’s incorporation of an anthem he wrote for the Holy Roman Emperor Francis II after hearing God Save the Queen in England when he visited in the 1790s. His melody was an instant hit and has variously been the anthems of Austria and Germany (where it...