Newsletter #54

It gives us enormous pleasure to be able to give advanced notice of a Strings Attached coffee concert next month.

Date:       22 November 2020
Time:      11.30am (a little later than usual to allow staff to prepare the venue after the previous night’s show)
Place:     Brighton Dome Concert Hall, where the Stalls will be reconfigured in cabaret style, to ensure social distancing (see picture). If needed there will be additional seating, suitably distanced, in the Stalls Circle.

Brighton Dome cabaretstyle

A further newsletter will give access and safety details. For the moment, the Strings Attached Committee is satisfied that the venue will be as Covid secure as is possible. To ensure this, Brighton Dome and Brighton Festival is working closely with the Brighton and Hove Director of Public Health.

The next newsletter will also provide details of the cost of tickets, any NCP parking deal and the booking arrangements, which will be by telephone only, to ensure that seating arrangements are appropriate.

If this concert is successful we hope to hold further concerts in January, February, March and April 2021.

Performers: Joanna MacGregor (piano) and the Gildas String Quartet

Programme:    Schubert Quartettsatz
Haydn String Quartet Opus 76 No.1
Shostakovich Piano Quintet

The Gildas have performed in all the right places, the Purcell Room, the Wigmore Hall and BBC Radio 3, although we don’t seem to have seen them in Brighton before. They’ve won the Audience Engagement Award at Graz, they’ve worked with modern composers – Harrison Birtwhistle, Colin Matthews – and they’ve played alongside the Brodsky Quartet, which takes some doing. But ignore all that, just listen to a few minutes of their playing of the last movement of Janáček’s Kreutzer Sonata on YouTube. All the usual passion and anguish is there but I’ve never heard them combined with such extraordinary lyricism.

Joanna MacGregor is not just a pianist but also a composer, conductor and festival curator. She’s Head of Piano at the Royal Academy of Music and Artistic Director at Dartington. She’s performed in more than 80 countries, working with top conductors such as Pierre Boulez, Colin Davis, and Simon Rattle. Above all, she’s recently been appointed Music Director of Brighton Philharmonic Orchestra, so we’ll be seeing more of her.

Membership renewal.
The membership of everyone who has paid a subscription to 31 July 2020 will be renewed automatically to 31 July 2021, without charge. If, however, you would like to pay your subscription for 2020/21, it would put Strings Attached in a stronger financial position and help us to contribute with confidence to the unprecedented costs of putting on concerts in Covid times. Membership renewal forms can be downloaded from https://www.stringsattachedmusic.org.uk/friends/ . Payment can be made by bank transfer or by cheque but the form still needs to be sent by post. For Gift Aid reasons please complete one per person.

Finally, it is with pride that we can announce that Brighton and Hove Arts Council has awarded its Outstanding Contribution to the Arts Award 2020 to our Chair, Mary McKean, for her work over many years with Strings Attached and the Regency Society. Details can be found on https://www.bh-arts.org.uk/ .

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