On Friday night we heard the iconic Brahms Op.115 Clarinet Quintet played by charismatic clarinetist Sharon Kam and the Dover String Quartet. The very same piece received an equally enlightened but far more unconventional treatment on Saturday night by the UK based group, ZRI.

Bear with me, dear reader, while I explain about ZRI: The band’s name stands for ‘Zum Roten Igel’, which translates as ‘to the Red Hedgehog’ – the tavern that Brahms frequented in Vienna in the 1880’s. They’re from the UK and, wonderfully, they pick apart classical masterpieces like Schubert’s String Quintet and Brahms’ Clarinet Quintet and mash them up with the Gipsy folk tunes that inspired them.

If you know your Brahms, you will be aware that the middle section of the Clarinet Quintet’s second movement is actually supposed to invoke gypsy improvisation. (According to Bruce Adolphe’s talk for the Chamber Music Society of the Lincoln Centre, Brahms is reminiscing about his adolescent concert tour with the Hungarian violinist Ede Remenyi.)

The rest of the group (Max Baillie on violin, Matthew Sharp cello, Jon Banks accordion and Iris Pissaride on cembalon) looped the chords from the second movement, while Ben Harlan embellished the clarinet part with increasingly complex improvisations.

In the third movement, as the improvisations became faster and more energetic, Harlan succeeded in doing something that none of the other superstar classical musicians had quite managed to do in this year’s Rosendal concerts. He let go. There was an uplifting moment of flow with Harlan playing and whirling to the music. It’s inconceivable that this ‘spirit of the dance’ wasn’t an ingredient in Brahms’ music making in the 19th century. What’s seriously great about the ZRI approach is that it allows the players (and their audiences) to get closer to Brahms’ musical truth.