New experience of being a part of an ensemble

I have been playing french horn for quite a while now and throughout my playing years I had participated and played in a lot of different stages and settings. I played solo, as a part of symphonic and wind orchestras. All these concerts and participations had helped me to develop my weak abilities that are needed for a good musician. Through solo playing I learned hwo to defeat stage fright and when I played in orchestras I learned to listen and quickly track what is happening around me and when I need to play. However, I had a realization recently, that only solo and orchestral playing wasn't enough. The development of the mentioned abilities was seen, but not enough for my needs. I could play alone yet there were still some problems in concentration while playing and even though I played together with an orchestra, I didn't seem to me that everyone was listening each other and playing together, while I wanted to learn to communciate with other musician while playing. As I said, these problems were highlighted recently, when I was offered to become a part of a wind quintet.
Wind quintet is a really interesting type of an ensemble and it is also one of the more popular types of ensembles. Wind quintet consist of 5 musician who play flute, oboe, clarinet, fagot and horn. The repertoire is mostly classical music but the pieces are often really nice and fun to play. I started playing in quintet at the start of 2016 and to this day it has been my 4 month as a part of it. The members of the ensemble are also students of the same music school I study at.
The best thing about this type of ensembles is that you need to work as a one if you want to sound good. Everyone needs to listen to others and adjust his tone and sound. It is really complex to play in a quintet and its solely because of this reason. When you play solo you are not concerned with others and the ones who accompany you needs to follow you and when you play in orchestra it would seem that it would be the same acase as quintet yet everyone really just looks at the conductor and plays their part. In either cases you are playing solely and when I had this transition to quintet it was extremely hard to sense and listen others. Most of the times I was out of tune, too loud, playing wrong notes and in the wrong time. It wasn't frustrating to try to play but certainly hard. After a few weeks of practises (we are practising every friday and saturday and we have extra before an important events) I started to finally listen to others and we were starting to play really well. This experience was really beneficial to me since I finally had a chance to develop skills that were crucial for me. Also, I improved my teamwork skills and noticed a few weaknesses of my own that I can now improve.
We also had a chance to participate in ensemble competition "Muzikines akvareles" this may and I am glad to say that we won the Gran Prix price as the best performing ensemble of the competition. It is always perferct to win something after the hard work that was put in,