13 instruments 15' 1983
First performed by Lontano conducted by Odaline de la Martinez in the Pump Room, Bath on 26 May 1984 as part of the Bath Festival
I do not remember a more consistently gripping concert of modern chamber music than the one given by Lontano under Odaline de la Martinez in the Pump Room during the opening weekend of the festival...
David Cairns in the Sunday Times 10/6/84
Each of the pieces presented here was a kind of musical landscape, prolific with flora and fauna, but often specific in the patterns that emerged, sometimes boldly, sometimes unobtrusively into the foreground ...among these tough compositions, Edward Lambert's Chamber Concerto appeared most approachable, with mainly conventional ideas being used to generate excitement from the sheer virtuosity of the ensemble. There was no descent into the cliche common among so many contemporary concertos for orchestra. Interposed among the passages of thematic decoration here were episodes when the ensemble coincided in statements, in octaves, or finally, Stravinskian dance rhythms. Here, above all, in this concert, the playing of the Lontano team was superbly coordinated and gripping.
Meirion Bowen in the Guardian 28/5/84
Edward Lambert's Chamber Concerto, a new piece, with its mangled trumpet-and-drum fanfares and violent conflicts between striding unison lines for strings and wind was strikingly imagined and very well played.
Nicholas Kenyon in The Times 28/5/84