Peter Cropper, the founder of the Lindsay String Quartet and indefatigable champion of chamber music in Sheffield, had planned his 70th birthday concert to be a family affair. Sadly, he wasn’t able to attend it, having died unexpectedly last May. Instead Cropper’s son Martin – an equally gifted violinist – led a heartfelt tribute along with his oboe-playing sister Hazel, her husband, oboist Adrian Wilson, and many former students and friends.

Cropper was once described by Gramophone magazine as “the Mick Jagger of the string quartet”. It’s a slightly misleading comparison, because Cropper, with his penchant for open-toed sandals, was surely responsible for introducing the Beatle fringe to the classical field. One senses that this most ebullient of musicians would have brooked no solemnity at his memorial, and prior to performing Mozart’s effervescent Oboe Quartet in F, Wilson recalled his father-in-law’s difficulties with the piece: “The oboe line bubbles like a fine champagne; then I come in sounding like cava.”

Cropper was most closely associated with the Bartók, Tippett and, above all, Beethoven quartets. However, the programme he had selected for his birthday was a festive celebration of earlier music, with Handel’s Arrival of the Queen of Sheba setting the scene for a sequence of concertos by Vivaldi and Bach. The slow movement of Bach’s D minor concerto for oboe and violin paired Cropper’s two children in an intimate conversation coloured by their grief. To conclude, Martin Cropper gave an emotional reading of Ralph Vaughan Williams’s The Lark Ascending, the first solo work his father performed in Sheffield, more than 40 years ago. The evanescent melody was both a blessing and a release – though I have heard many more technically polished versions of this piece, I doubt I will encounter one more courageous or so moving.