Education & Outreach
Our education and outreach programme is extensive and hugely important to us. Central to this is our ambition to encourage all sections of society to experience and enjoy chamber music at its highest standards.
CAVATINA Chamber Music Trust
The CAVATINA Chamber Music Trust exists to to attract young people to chamber music concerts in order to ensure audiences for chamber music in the future. Our concerts for Cavatina take place in schools across London and around the UK. We introduce the music throughout the concert, and talk about what a string quartet is and does, our instruments and how they work, and chamber music in general. The children take part in a variety of games and activities during the concert, and are asked for their thoughts, reactions and questions throughout.
Wigmore Hall
The Wigmore Hall education programme is extensive. We have performed in the Wigmore's Christmas family concert, and given concerts on behalf of the Hall in various venues including a centre for refugees and asylum seekers in Bayswater. We have also worked on creative music projects in mainstream and special needs schools around London, including a highly successful project led by composer Duncan Chapman.
Recently we spent a day at the Wigmore Hall coaching student quartets in three new string quartets from the ABRSM's Spectrum Series.
Sacconi Chamber Music Festival at Folkestone
One of the main aims of our Festival is that we take our festival out into the community, playing in a range of community venues, often to sections of society who would be simply unable to come to the main Festival concerts. During the weeks leading up to the 2008 Festival, we played to prisoners in Canterbury Prison, refugees and asylum seekers at the Kent Refugee Action Network centre in Dover, and elderly residents at Cheriton Age Concern. We played concerts in three schools, and put on a family concert for children and adults in the weekend before the Festival.
There was also a dance choreography project, where three groups of children and students created dances to string quartet music Stravinsky and Haydn, and performed these dances alongside our performances of the music.
In these ways, the audience for our Festival comprises a massive range of people of different backgrounds, all participating in the experience of listening to chamber music.
