WELSHPOOL Music Club's 75th anniversary season reaches its half way point next Thursday, January 18, with a concert by the tenor Peter Harris and his piano accompanist Hamish Brown.

Peter and Hamish were winners of the 2017 Oxford Lieder Young Artist Platform. Oxford Lieder grants Young Artist Awards to two outstanding duos each year, and Welshpool is privileged to have Peter and Hamish performing.

They will be singing a programme of songs by Clara Schumann, Johannes Brahms, Benjamin Britten and Ivor Gurney, including Gurney’s settings of songs from ‘A Shropshire Lad’, and ‘Winter Words’, Britten’s settings of poems by Thomas Hardy.

The season continues on February 15 with the Albany Piano Trio, a dynamic ensemble whose repertoire focuses on works by female composers – both current and historic – alongside the traditional canon of piano trio music.

Founded in 2010, the trio has appeared at major venues, are featured artists in Making Music’s Concert Promoters’ Guide and the Concordia Foundation, and the trio were awarded the Richard Carne Junior Fellowship at the Royal College of Music in 2014.

They are recent finalists in the St Martin’s International Chamber Competition and winners of the Gwyneth George Award from the Piano Trio Society.

The last of the Thursday night concerts at Welshpool Methodist Church will be on March 15, and will feature the Bute Clarinet Quartet, founded in 2013 by Welshpool native Tom Howells, with three fellow clarinettists while studying at the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama.

Since graduating they continue to perform as a quartet while pursuing their freelance careers as soloists and orchestral players. The quartet have won numerous competitions, including the National Eisteddfod Ensemble Prize in 2014 and are now a member of the Live Music Now scheme.

To end their 75th Anniversary Season in party mood, the club are staging an additional concert, not included in the subscription price.

This will be on Saturday, April 7, and feature The Jim Wynn Swingtet, a nine piece mini big band that performs music in the style of a 1930s dance band.

The Swingtet’s repertoire is drawn from the Great American Songbook, largely composed between the 1910s and 1940s. All of the songs will be given a distinctly 1930s swing-era makeover, inspired by the likes of Duke Ellington, Count Basie and Benny Goodman. Tickets are £12, available at the door.