Concert at St Giles Church - Preparation!
Although the quartet are very accustomed to travelling long distances to play, this week, it’s particularly nice to be playing a concert about a five minute walk from my house. We’re going to be performing a concert tomorrow evening in St Giles Church in our home village of Cheddington - and have been working hard to develop a great programme of music to play.
Although actually programming the music might sound like the easy part, a lot of careful thought has to go into it. If the programme is too ‘heavy’, we’ll attract a very specialised (and very small) audience - because, although they can be exquisite, not everyone wants to sit through 45 minute long ’serious’ string quartets.
If we opt for a concert of purely ‘popular classics’, we run the risk of only ever playing well known pieces and the audience never get the chance to discover lesser works which they might really enjoy.
We’ve decided to go for a real mixture - about 80% popular classics, with some less well known pieces to keep it interesting for both us and the audience. With a theme of “Travellers Tales”, we’ll present a series of miniature pieces, each representing a different country with a composer of each nationality. For example, we’ll represent England with a piece by Holst, Russia with a work by Borodin and there will rousing Polka by Strauss to represent Austria.
Of course, most of these pieces weren’t originally written for string quartet so have had to be arranged creatively and for this particular concert I’ve spent many hours working on this aspect of preparation.
This week, the other three players were given their folders of music for individual practice and we’ve scheduled several hours of rehearsal for tomorrow afternoon. One drawback with doing intensive string quartet rehearsal on the day of the concert is it can be physically and mentally exhausting to play for most of the day, then go straight onto the concert in the evening, but with the other players all living in London, it’s more practical to prepare our parts individually and then get together on the day. Regular breaks and plenty of food are absolutely essential to keep us going!
In terms of advertising, with any rural event, it’s vitally important to get the word around locally. Leaflets have been distributed round houses, posters have gone up in shop windows, we’ve given interviews on local radio and sent press releases to all the nearby newspapers. Looking to attract a wider audience, we’ve listed the concert on classical music websites and concert sites - so with any luck concert goers from further afield will find us.
We are all very much looking forward to playing the concert tomorrow night - I’ve still got some tricky violin passages to perfect, and a few more last minute leaflets to distribute, so by the time the concert starts at 7.45pm tomorrow, the really hard work should be over and we can enjoy the musical experience along with the audience.
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