Sound Festival, now well into its second decade, is a celebration of new music that gathers up performances that would be difficult to find elsewhere. One of its most successful programming strands over recent years is a celebration of endangered instruments. It’s hard to imagine an orchestra without an oboe carrying plaintive melody or a double-bass section sawing away with their grounding ballast. What to choose as a young person embarking on instrumental learning probably isn’t an easy decision to make, but it seems that the challenges of double-reed oboe and bassoon, French horn, viola and double bass, mean that these aren’t the first to be snapped up.

Taking place across Aberdeen, Sound Festival has brought together some of the foremost practitioners in their fields to form the first ever Endangered Instrument Ensemble. Needless to say, nothing has previously been composed for this particular combination, so the festival has commissioned four new works from Daniel Kidane, Electra Perivolaris, Lisa Robertson, and Garth Knox (pictured, top), all of which will be premiered on Saturday 29 October in Queen’s Cross Church.

^{Elise Dabrowski (picture: Adrien Hippolyte)}

Music for different combinations of those instruments can be heard too, with violist Garth Knox and double-bass player Elise Dabrowski having fun in a game of musical Mirrors (Cowdray Hall, Thursday 27 October) as they reflect each other in meetings of creative minds, whether it’s Marin Marais meeting György Kurtág or polymath abbess Hildegard von Bingen encountering 20^th-century Italian aristocrat Giacinto Scelsi. For anyone who plays an endangered instrument, there’s also the chance to join the first ever Endangered Instrument Orchestra, which performs a new commission by Rūta Vitkauskaitė at King’s Pavilion on the festival’s final day.

Sound Festival, various venues, Aberdeen, Wednesday 26–Sunday 30 October.