Annual Report of the Committee for the year January to December 2025
This is the fifteenth annual report of Strings Attached. It summarises the activity of the membership group during 2025 and includes the Coffee Concert series 2024/25 and references to both the 2025/26 and 2026/7 seasons.
A successful series of seven concerts in the 2024/5 season took place, with the Fibonacci Quartet opening the season in September, followed by Oliver Stankiewicz and Friends, Charlotte Spruit and Friends, the Elmore Quartet, the Castalian String Quartet, the Doric String Quartet and Friends, and the Aquinas Piano Trio.
Three receptions immediately following concerts were held for Members of Strings Attached, offering an opportunity to meet the players and each other, and to enjoy a glass of wine and nibbles.
The current season 2025/26 has received support from Margaret Polmear in memory of Andrew Polmear, a founder and strong supporter of Strings Attached.Three concerts have taken place so far given by the Kaleidoscope Chamber Collective, the Dogoda Quintet, and the Heath Quartet with Ben Goldscheider.
This is the first season under the directorship of the new Brighton Dome CEO, Lucy Davies. We are grateful to Lucy for meeting with and consulting with Strings Attached on the development of the series and for assuring us of her support.
As the Cavatina scheme, offering free concert tickets to young people, has come to an end, Strings Attached agreed to step in and offer fully funded tickets to concert goers from 8-25 years during the 2025/26 season, which our current financial position has allowed. As well as publicising the scheme in our Newsletters and through Brighton Dome publicity channels, we sent details to all Brighton and Hove Sixth Forms. Whether we will be able to continue funding free tickets for young people in future years will be dependent on membership numbers and donations. We plan to make a further call for donations before the current season ends. The Committee believes that this is a valuable use of our funds in order to ensure the continuation of Chamber Music in the region in the future.
Audience numbers continue to hold firm, as does the take up of free tickets.
So far in the 2025/6 season 22 tickets for young people were funded for the Kaleidoscope Chamber Collective in October and 28 in November for the Dogoda Wind Quintet. In January the Heath Quartet with Ben Goldscheider performed and joined members at the reception which followed for some lively discussions. There will be three further concerts this season, with the Elmore, Regency and Fibonacci Quartets respectively.
At each concert free sheets were made available for audience members. Programme notes were written by Chris Darwin, Guy Richardson and Helen Simpson, and we remain very grateful for their work on these. Short biographical details of the players and information about the next concert in the season were included. For the 2025/6 season, these were successfully redesigned from A5 to an A4 format to save printing costs.
The Newsletter continued to be managed and despatched regularly to members by Betty Skolnick. Chris Darwin has provided and maintained the calendar of local concerts and the directory of local players, demonstrating the breadth of the community supporting Chamber Music across Sussex. We remain very grateful to Betty Skolnick and Chris Darwin for their work.
The Strings Attached website continues to be managed and maintained by David Botibol. In 2025, the website was expanded to hold an archive of all the programme notes written for our programmes. The website continues to hold details of the concerts as well as sound clips for members to enjoy if they wish to prepare for a Coffee Concert. The support for the committee which David provides throughout the year with his knowledge of IT has been invaluable, especially for our online membership application/renewal systems and for online delivery of the Programme Notes and Newsletters. We are most grateful to David for all his work for Strings Attached.
Turning to the 2026/7 Coffee Concert series, in January we learnt that for operational and financial reasons at Brighton Dome, only 4 concerts will be offered. Brighton Dome is hoping to maximise income by expanding the number of shows, installations and activities in the Corn Exchange, making setting up Sunday morning programmes more difficult. It will, therefore, be important to encourage take up of Coffee Concert tickets as much as possible, to ensure that they are financially viable across the season. Some increase in ticket prices is also to be expected. However, we were assured by Lucy Davies that chamber music remains an important and valuable part of their programming.
Dates for the 2026/7 season have been set as follows:
September 20th,
November 22nd,
February 21st,
April 11th.
Programme details will follow by the beginning of summer.
Strings Attached has continued its links with Create Music. In November’s Newsletter we included information for Create Music’s Big Give Christmas Challenge. In the following Newsletter we were delighted to be able to report that, when matched by the Chalk Cliff Trust, £30,628 plus Gift Aid will have been raised towards the bursary scheme to help children across Brighton, Hove and East Sussex to learn and play music.
Our connection with the Brighton and Hove Arts Council remains strong, and we were delighted to attend an awards evening where our nominee, Chris Darwin, received their Outstanding Contribution for the Arts Award 2025 for his contribution to chamber music in the region.
The committee met five times over 2025. Work continued between meetings by email. Before the 2025 AGM Helen Simpson announced her intention to stand down as Chair but offered to remain on the committee.The committee is very grateful for her work. Jill Bourne agreed to take on the role of Chair and was duly elected. Due to pressure of other work, Guy Richardson stepped down from the committee in December 2025, but agreed to continue writing programme notes for the remainder of the 2025/26 season at least. We are extremely grateful for his work on these. Current committee members are Jill Bourne (Chair), Christine Moon (Treasurer), Margaret Polmear (Secretary), Betty Skolnick (Newsletter Editor) and Helen Simpson.
There were 61 paid up members and 6 honorary memberships at December 2025.
If you would like to find out more about Strings Attached or make a donation towards our work, please contact us at:
info@stringsattachedmusic.org.uk
Jill Bourne
February 2026