The extended quartet family

17. December 2016 Concerts, News, Photos 0
The extended quartet family

We’ve not posted anything on here for a while, but the quartet have been far from quiet this year, in fact it’s been one of the busiest (and slightly chaotic) periods we’ve ever had.

The quartet family expanded in two linked ways this year.  Carmen took a break from the quartet for a few months whilst she went off to have little baby Harry.  She has since returned, and Harry even attended his first gig the other week.  It’s important for musicians to indoctrinate kids into musical culture as early as possible and Harry proved he was a natural by falling asleep as soon as we started playing (a true critic in the making).

 

 

 

 

 

Whilst Carmen was away we were very lucky that we managed to persuade Sally Gogna to come and fill in.  We’ve known Sally for years and have played with her in various shows and big bands so we knew we’d be in safe hands.  Stepping into a quartet isn’t an easy thing to do – there’s a lot of music to learn and everyone else has been playing it for years, but Sally did a great job and did a number of gigs with us over the summer and autumn.

Over the last few years we’ve been building up our repertoire of Christmas music – mostly through prolific arrangements done by Maria – and this year we took on quite a few Christmas gigs to allow us to make the most of this music.  As well as more informal events such as the Duxford and Linton Christmas markets we were also delighted to return to Little Wilbraham to do a somewhat more formal festive concert.

One of the advantages of playing for such varied events is that you never know who you’ll meet.  When we were playing at the Linton Christmas market we were put next to a stall belonging to Naomi Davies – a fantastic local artist.  Whilst we were playing we could see her sketching away, and when we finished she presented us with this lovely sketch of the quartet which is a great reminder of the day.

This week we’ll be doing our last event of 2016, but we have plenty of plans for 2017 so keep watching this space…